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POETS OF AMERICA. 



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BOOKS BY MR. STEDMAN 

VICTORIAN POETS. Revised and Enlarged Edition. 
Crown 8vo, gilt top, $2.25. 

POETS OF AMERICA. A companion volume to <' Vic- 
torian Poets." Crown 8vo, gilt top, ^2.25. 

A VICTORIAN ANTHOLOGY. 1837-1895. Selec- 
tions illustrating the Editor's Critical Review of British 
Poetry in the Reign of Victoria. Large 8vo, gilt top, 
$2.50; full gilt, 33.00. 

AN AMERICAN ANTHOLOGY. 1787-1900. Selec- 
tions illustrating the Editor's Critical Review of American 
P«etry in the Nineteenth Century. Large 8vo, gilt top, 
^3.005 full gilt, 33- 5°- 

POEMS. Household Edition. With Portrait and Illustra- 
tions. l2mo, ^1.50; full gilt, $2.00. 

POEMS NOW FIRST COLLECTED. 1 2mo, gilt top, 
$1.50. 

HAWTHORNE, AND OTHER POEMS. i6mo, 
$1.25. 

MATER CORONATA. Recited at the Bicentennial of 
Yale University. 8vo, $1.00, net. 

THE NATURE AND ELEMENTS OF POETRY. 
Crown 8vo, gilt top, $1.50. 

PROSE AND POETIC WORKS. Including Poems, 
Victorian Poets, Poets of America, Nature and Elements 
of Poetry. 4 vols, uniform, crown 8vo, gilt top, in box, 
^7.50. 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

BOSTON AND NEW YORK 



POETS 



OF AMERICA 



BY 



EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN 



AUTHOR OF "VICTORIAN POETS 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 



^ 



Copyrighr, 1885, 
B» EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN. 

All rights reserved. 



' tWENT-i^ 't'lksT IMPRESSION 



■ t I c t,c >^ « / « 

• «■ "• c c c t c * « f t* t, 



T-itf Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. 
Electrotyped and Printed by H, O. Houghton & Company. 



^ 



TO 

THE YOUNGER WRITERS OF AMERICA 

^^ THIS WORK, 

CHIEFLY A REVIEW OF OUR FIRST DISTINCTIVE 
LVRICAL PERIOD, 



\% cortJiallg Unscribcti. 



INTRODUCTION. 



TEN years have passed since the completion of my 
critical survey of the poets and poetry of England 
from the beginning of the present reign. The scheme of 
the Victorian Poets included, besides an extended review 
of acknowledged leaders, a concise analysis of groups 
forming the general choir of the period represented. 
The work thus became somewhat complete in scope, and 
doubtless has served as a critical handbook and means 
of reference. This incidental result, however, was quite 
subordinate to the author's main design; and I think 
that such a fact was evident not only to a professional 
class, but to all readers interested concerning the spirit 
and methods of poetry, — especially of our English song. 
To that design I wish shortly to refer, as it is the 
chief motive of the present volume also. But first I 
would reproduce a statement made in the Preface to the 
former work, viz., — that the author originally had under- 
taken to write upon the poets of this country and the 
causes of their successes and failures ; that on examina- 
tion he had found modern and radical changes in the 
conditions affecting ideal effort, at home and abroad ; 



viii INTRODUCTION, 



that for this and other reasons he could *'more freely 
and graciously begin by choosing a foreign paradigm 
than by entering upon the home-field, and that none could 
be so good for the purpose as the poetry of Great 
Britain." It seemed to him, also, that, until after some 
training of this kind, "affection, reverence, national feel- 
ing, or some less worthy emotion, might be thought to 
prevent an American from writing without prejudice " 
of the poets of his own country. Certainly he could at- 
tempt this more profitably when the changes mentioned 
should be more complete, and the careers more rounded 
of the chief American writers who would pass under 
review. 

The time came when I felt emboldened to renew my 
original undertaking, and the result is set forth in this 
volume. My belief is strengthened that the. earlier trea- 
tise was essential to it, and, in fact, the most expedient 
preliminary task that could be chosen. The modern con- 
ditions, as far as they relate to both countries, could be 
observed more directly in England than in America, 
their stress being there of earlier origin and less dif- 
fused. My previous synopsis of them now has only to 
be condensed, and supplemented by discussion of those 
other conditions that are peculiar to this country alone. 
Furthermore, I regard the treatise on British poetry as 
of less significance, in its field of observation, than the 
work now following it ; and I trust that reasons for this 
opinion — to which some at first may demur — will be- 
come apparent to those who give more than a cursory 



INTRODUCTION. ix 



reading to these essays. Even now few Americans set 
a proper value on the relative bearing of our ideal and 
intellectual progress thus far. The instinctive deference 
of a young nation to its elders, and the frequent assur- 
ance of the latter that our progress has been restricted 
chiefly to physical achievement, have united until a re- 
cent date to make us accept that view of the matter. 
Aesop's lion discovered that the honors of a contest de- 
pend largely upon the sculptor that commemorates it. 
If there were a stake-boat, a winning-post, by which the 
comparative import (waiving the question of inherent 
value) of national activities could be measured exactly, 
various estimates might be disestablished. What is of 
most concern, in relation to the theine of this work, is 
the fact that the literature — even the poetic literature — 
of no country, during the last half-century, is of greater 
interest to the philosophical student, with respect to its 
bearing on the future, than that of the United States. 
My judgment is to this effect, after years in which I have 
read a good deal of native and foreign comment upon 
the subject. The reasons for it are generally perceptible 
in the ensuing chapters, but three may be stated here 
succinctly : i. American poetry, more than that of Eng- 
land during the period considered, has idealized — often in- 
spired — the national sentiment, the historic movements, 
of the land whose writers have composed it. 2. This 
nation already, — in the second century of a growth 
which began not in barbarism, but in political civiliza- 
tion, — is gaining in strength, population, and the liberal 



INTROD UCTIOJV. 



arts, at an accelerative speed that soon must make it a 
typical exemplar of ideal as well as material production. 
Nor can there be a time when the bent of its ideality 
will be more suggestive than now, for the present angle 
determines the arc of the future. 3. The first true 
course of American poetry has distinguished the prin= 
cipal term covered in these essays ; a first heat has 
been run during that time, to whose leaders special 
chapters are devoted. It is rare that an epoch so def- 
initely begun and ended can be selected as the object 
of synthetic examination. The reader is invited to study 
a period as distinct in literature as our Constitutional 
period in politics, or the Thirty Years* War in history ; 
one, moreover, in which poetry bore closer relations to 
the life and enthusiasm of a people than it often has 
borne in other lands and times. 

We see, also, that this term has been singularly con- 
current with that of the Victorian hemicycle, so that an 
examination of the poetry of our English tongue for the 
last fifty years is compassed in my two books. In order 
to perceive the evolution of a new minstrelsy from its 
foreign and native germs, the opening chapters of this 
volume are occupied partly with, the efforts of the Colo- 
nial verse - writers and their immediate successors. A 
final chapter contains a rapid summary of what is now 
doing, as a basis for speculation on the outlook and the 
chances of a revival in the future. The reader thus ob- 
tains a general view of American poets and poetry from 
their outset to the present date. 



INTRODUCTION. xi 



Nevertheless, the main purpose of this work, as sug- 
gested heretofore, is to continue my former effort, by 
obtaining further illustrations of the poetic life, and ideas 
with respect to the spirit and methods of the art of 
poetry. The marginal Analysis and topical Index are 
planned to accord with this intention. My views were 
formulated to some extent in our consideration of the 
transatlantic field. They can be emphasized in no way 
more readily than by fresh and personal examples which 
are a kind of object-lessons ; by criticism of a new 
series of poets, employing the same tongue, but varying 
in genius and temperament, and influenced by the con- 
ditions of a distinct environment. 

The tenor of the original discussion, which I have no 
reason to modify seriously, was in favor of simplicity, 
impulse, sincerity, as opposed to obscurity, didacticism, 
and the affectation either of refinement or a " saucy 
roughness," — always in behalf of imagination, and against 
the multiform devices proffered, consciously or uncon- 
sciously, in lieu of that supreme quality. It placed con- 
struction before decoration, the tone of a composition 
above its detail, and looked to the spirit rather than the 
structure, — not content, however, with the half-truth of 
a writer who declares that poetry is a spirit, not a 
form, — the truth being that poetry is a spirit, taking 
form. Finally, I welcomed every sign of healthy passion 
and every promising dramatic tendency, both invigorat- 
ing after a prolonged reflective period. Various sins of 
commission were discoverable among the lesser pupils of 



Xii INTRODUCTION. 



Wordsworth, the " spasmodic " lyrists, the Neo-Romantic 
artificers, etc., and frequently an absence was noted of 
merits that undoubtedly are found in our native verse — 
simplicity and honest impulse. The last-named traits do 
not of themselves suffice, for spontaneity must be allied 
with power. American singers often have been more 
natural than imaginative, and have risen to passion only 
in rare individual or public crises. Our most noted 
group, that of New England, distinguished for grace 
and scholarship, fervent in conviction and of marked in- 
tellectuality, has been pronounced too thin - blooded ; 
what sensuousness enriches American poetry has ap- 
peared chiefly in the work of its middle and younger 
schools. On the other hand, our verse has been meas- 
urably free from the vice of over-decoration, prevalent 
in the writings of the minor British romanticists ten 
years or more ago. It is to be hoped that the trace 
of this now observed is something from which the new 
school soon will free itself. And I here say to our 
young writers, as I have said again and again with re- 
spect to their foreign standards, that in literature, as in 
architecture, construction must be decorated, not decora- 
tion constructed, — that invention must precede them 
both, — and that, if imagination be clouded and the glow 
of passion unfelt, it is utter and worthless jugglery to 
compose at all. An enumeration, in a closing chapter, 
of younger poets and their efforts is purposely uncritical, 
except in the case of Lanier ; it aims to show these at 
iheir best, but the fact is not gainsaid that there is a 



INTRODUCTION. X1H 



lull in the force and efficacy of American song. My 
conclusion is that we arc not experiencing a decadence, 
but rather a diversion of imaginative energy to new 
forms of employment, and this not without a fair com- 
pensation. It may be well that our verse thus should 
escape the phase of minute realism and analysis through 
which modern literature is passing, and which probably 
will give way before a dramatic and inventive impulse 
by the time a second epoch of poetic achievement shall 
be inaugurated. 

My review of the exquisite productions of Tennyson 
and his compeers led to consideration of the methods of 
poetry as an art. Apt illustrations were at hand, and 
my remarks often and designedly were addressed to fel- 
lows of the craft. The present work is less technical ; 
I have more to say of the poetic temperament and the 
conditions that affect it ; more of poetry as the music 
of emotion, faith, aspiration, and all the chords of life. 
The atmosphere in which our poets have flourished is 
observed, as well as their special aids and hindrances 
and whatever has been significant in their various ca- 
reers. The personality of the noted American minstrels 
has been more suggestive than that of their English 
contemporaries. In this respect they bear a likeness to 
the poets of the Georgian era. With few exceptions the 
Victorian brotherhood, living under advanced social and 
literary systems, have been neither greatly involved with 
the action and history of their time nor picturesquely 
conspicuous as individuals. Nevertheless, it is not the 



Xiv INTRODUCTION. 

main thing, in writing of a poet, to consider the expe- 
riences which he shares in common with other men. 
He must be judged by things peculiar to himself — ^ the 
creative gift and work that bring him within the franchise 
of literary criticism. The estimate, then, to a certain 
extent must be technical ; and so far as my own com- 
ment has been addressed to the literary class, its en- 
deavor is, as a Californian author pleases me by saying, 
to get down to the bed-rock of poetry as an art and to 
its pure gold as an inspiration. If passages occur where 
the agreement of polite thinkers, as to established proc- 
esses and conclusions, is not assumed as a matter of 
course, it is because I hope this volume will be read by 
some who hitherto have paid slight attention to its topics. 
There is no good reason why a critical treatise, like any 
other work, should not appeal to both select and general 
readers, though possibly on very diverse grounds of in- 
terest. 

During the preparation of this work, the last of its 
kind that I shall publish, I have had my share of the 
ills from which none are quite exempt. It has been de- 
layed by the rarity of intervals at which I could devote 
a wholesome energy to its completion, and feel assured 
that it would betray no tinge of personal discourage- 
ment. If injustice has been done, in the delicate task of 
making even the slightest reference to one's literary as- 
sociates, it has not been of malice aforethought. 

Acknowledgment is due to friends, — especially to 
Messrs. Gilder, Johnson, Buel, and Carey, of "The Cen- 



INTRODUCTION. xv 



tury" office, — and to Mr. G. T. Elliot, the scholarly cor- 
rector at the Riverside Press, and his assistants, for pro- 
fessional courtesies in aid of my labor now ended ; also 
to my son, Arthur Stedman, for expert revision of copy 
and verification of names and dates. Where authorities 
differ, or are silent, with respect to matters of fact, I 
have consulted — as far as practicable — the persons di- 
rectly interested, except in the cases of living female 
writers whose dates of birth are not given already in 

standard compilations. 

^ E. C. S. 

New York, September, 1885. 



CONTENTS. 



> 
CHAPTER I. Page 

Early and i<ecent Conditions ...••( i 

CHAPTER II. 
Growth of the American School 31 

CHAPTER III. 
William Cullen Bryant 62 

CHAPTER IV. 
John Greenleaf Whittier • • 95 

CHAPTER V. 
Ralph Waldo Emerson 133 

CHAPTER VI. 
Henry Wads worth Longfellow . . • • • .180 

CHAPTER VII. 
Edgar Allan Poe 225 

CHAPTER VIII. 
Oliver Wendell Holmes 273 



Xviii CONTENTS, 

CHAPTER IX. 
James Russell Lowell 304 

CHAPTER X. 
Walt Whitman . . • . 349 

CHAPTER XI. 
Bayard Taylor 396 

CHAPTER XII. 
The Outlook 435 

INDEX . • . ... ... . .477 



POETS OF AMERICA. 



POETS OF AMERICA. 



CHAPTER I 



EARLY AND RECENT CONDITIONS. 



I. 

IT is my design to trace the current of poesy, deep- 
ening and widening in common with our streams 
of riches, knowledge, and power ; to show an influence 
upon the national sentiment no less potent, if less ob- 
vious, than that derived from the historic records of 
our past ; to watch the first dawning upon an eager 
people of " the happy, heavenly vision men call Art " ; 
to observe closely and to set down with an honest 
hand our foremost illustrations of the Rise of Poetry in 
America. Such is my purpose, and I deem it not a 
mean one. We think of power and wealth as things in 
themselves, but they are strong and rich only in their 
relations to the life of man. The essential part of that 
life is in his spirit, of which imagination is the king, — 
and the sister arts, with poetry at their front, are to be 
accounted its highest forms of expression. 

The song of a nation is accepted as an ultimate test 
of the popular spirit ; as the earliest form of speech 
and the ripest, — whether the utterance of feelings 
common to all, or of the fine and daring speculations 
of the noblest minds. Examine it, and form opinions 
of the country's general literature, of the hold upon 
art and action and scientific achievement. If we have 



The au- 
thor s piif\ 
pose. 



Natiofial 
song. 



EARLY AND RECENT CONDITIONS. 



Cp. " Vic 
torian Po- 
ets^^ :p. I. 



Suggestion 
to the 
reader. 



seen a true poetic movement in America, we may be 
sure that we have had marches in other fields of prog- 
ress. The inquiry concerning the genuineness and 
value of such a movement affords a title to this work, 
and a review of the conditions that have helped or hin- 
dered it must be included. Upon the method chosen 
for a study of the recent period in England, my present 
researches are devoted chiefly to the careers and pro- 
ductions of leading poets whose reputations are long- 
established, and who, upon the whole, fairly represent 
the various tendencies of American song. And thus, 
incidentally and with fresh opportunities, we may ex- 
tend our knowledge of " the aim and province of the 
art of Poetry," and obtain under a new atmosphere fur- 
ther illustrations of the poetic temperament and life. 

The subject cannot be lightly entered upon, and as 
if for entertainment merely. Properly considered, 
there is no more suggestive undertaking than to re- 
view the first displays of lyrical genius in a land as 
notable as any upon earth. These may seem crude 
and familiar to ourselves, and possibly are not fully 
estimated by older nations whose very age and glory 
make them self-contained. But, if the future is to 
have a greatness of its own, a study of New World 
poetry is of equal importance with that devoted to 
the earlier or contemporary verse of the mother-land. 
The reader, then, will do well to bear with the de- 
tails of a prefatory analysis, though they lack that in- 
terest which adheres to the lives and works of the 
various poets to whom his attention will be invited. 
The points which I shall make will not be wholly 
novel, but by grouping them newly, and in a logical 
manner, we may get some notion of the real quality 
of the first genuine awakening of our home-song. 

For that there has been such an awakening is the 



LAWS OF GROWTH. 



very cause and foundation of these essays, and if I 
did not perceive tliis fact 1 should have no excuse 
for their general endeavor. It is true that a nation's 
literature will not appear out of season. Poetry, its 
most spontaneous form, is a growth rather than an 
artifice, or it does not come to strengthen and to 
stay. Let me acknowledge, as heretofore, the bear- 
ing of the conditions under which it is produced, and 
that a poet must be viewed in the light and shadow 
of his environment ; furthermore, that when a time is 
ripe there are found both idealists and men of action 
to represent it, — springing up as when, in the phys- 
ical world, the pines and fir-trees of a virgin forest 
have been cleared away, and a novel flora suddenly 
appears, whose germs have been hidden in the under- 
mould, awaiting their own season of room and light 
and air. But let me also, and at present no less 
than in our foreign excursions, include a factor which 
the new criticism often overlooks. Too little allow- 
ance is made for the surprises of genius. We forget 
that now and then some personage comes without a 
summons, like a stray leader from the skies \ that 
works appear under adverse circumstances, so new, 
so strong, so revolutionary, as to seem inspired cre- 
ations, — men and works that overleap the stages of 
development, that demand the spiritual factor, the 
personal equation, the allowance for exception, in the 
problem of national growth. In the absence of a 
sunlit atmosphere, they shine by inward light, and 
communicate heat and lustre to their surroundings. 
When a link in the chain of evolution is missing, such 
are the forces that make up for it. But there are 
other forces, and certain modes of intellectual effort, 
which assist growth and somewhat forestall the ordi- 
nary process. Even criticism may do a share, and 



Lniv of 
e?tviron- 
tncnt ; 



and the 
factory 
which 
modify its 
effect. 



EARLY AND RECENT CONDITIONS. 



Matters 
first to be 
considered. 



Question of 
a Home- 
School and 
its charac- 
teristics. 



Essential 
quality. 



often by penetrative study of the leaders that reflect 
or stimulate the various tendencies of a people's ide- 
ality. Of course a poet must represent his age and 
habitat ; a Grecian temple beside an Alleghanian 
trout-brook might be lovely, but surely would be out 
of place and date. It is now my province to discover 
what special aids the poets of America have expe- 
rienced, and what hindrances. In no modern coun- 
try has ideality been more retarded than in our own \ 
and I think that certain restrictions have peculiarly 
limited production in the field of Poetry, — the chief 
of imaginative arts. Yet I see that, in spite of these, 
the ultimate rise of an American school of poetry 
was swift and strong, and that its chiefs have had 
their aids no less than their obstacles, and have 
bravely confronted the latter. And thus we are 
brought directly to the preliminary issue. 



II. 

Much has been written of late upon the topic of 
our native literature. Is there a distinctly American 
school .'' If not, when and where shall we look for 
one ? What are, or should be, its special character- 
istics.? These and similar questions are frequently 
and somewhat vaguely discussed. 

Now, it is first to be observed that the radical 
quality of any national school, in any country or pe- 
riod, does not wholly depend upon the types, per- 
sonages, localities, and other materials utilized by its 
artists and men of letters ; and this is especially true 
with regard to the work of a poet, in distinction from 
that of a painter. The specific tone of the former 
artist is not derived from the images which his gen- 
ius informs with life, and from the plots that serve 



NATIONAL QUALITY 



his expression of the thought, passion, imagination, 
of his people and time. Mere reliance upon these 
will not suffice. Even a painter might devote his life 
to copying the groups he finds in his own streets, the 
streets themselves, and the fields and woods beyond 
them, yet not produce an original art, nor execute it 
in a fresh and native way. The mere dialect and 
legends of a province or section are powerless to 
convey their essential quality to the song of a poet 
who calls them to his aid. Mr. Grant White, there- 
fore, was perfectly right when he suggested, for these 
and other reasons, that it is the spirit, not the letter, 
which giveth life ; that we must pay regard to the 
flavor, rather than to the form and color, of the fruit, 
— to the distinctive character, not the speech and 
aspect, of the personage. Unless the feeling of our 
home-poet be novel, his vision a fresh and distinctive 
vision, — unless these are radically different from the 
French, or German, or even the English feeling and 
vision, — they are not American, and our time has 
not yet come. 

But I am not with this distinguished writer in his 
further claim that we still are essentially English, and 
shall be so for a long series of years to come ; that 
our literature, like the language we inherit, is wholly 
English, and must remain so for centuries, until " An- 
glo-Saxon and Hollander and German and Irishman 
and negro and Chinese shall have so blended their 
blood . . . that from the fusion a new race shall have 
sprung." What I first call to mind is that there are 
few Americans, even those of but one remove, who 
are not instantly recognized abroad as being very dif- 
ferent from Englishmen, not only with respect to fea- 
ture, mould, and speech, — which vary according to the 
sections from which they come, — but in their senti- 



R. G. 

pyftiie, in 
tJie N. Y. 
'Jitnes, 
Feb. I, 
1880. 



Hon. 



EARLY AND RECENT CONDITIONS. 



" Tke 
Scarlet 
Letter. ^^ 



A distinc- 
tive na- 
tional 
character. 



ment, modes of thought and feeUng, and way of look- 
ing at things. In both outward and inward traits 
they are pronounced distinctively un-English and 
" American," however divided among themselves. 
Again, by so much as the style is the man, I believe 
that the literary product of this new* people differs 
from the literary product of the English, or any other 
people of the Old World, and I hope to make that 
difference clear in the course of these chapters. And 
I will remark, in passing, that " The Scarlet Letter," 
a romance which Mr. White cited in illustration, to 
me appears thoroughly un-English in its mystical 
temper, and its undertone and atmosphere ; if not 
broadly American, it is locally so, — the fruit and out- 
giving of the New England sentiment that brooded 
in its author's spirit, and of which it is a soul-wrought 
witness and dramatic chronicle. 

In fine, recognizing the error of those who, by a 
forced effort, would anticipate creations that will come 
only of themselves, or through the natural impulse of 
foreordained artists, I also perceive that already, in 
various walks of art, and in none more than in that 
to which our present study is devoted, we have ex- 
hibited the new and broad results, both of acclima- 
tion and of a blending process, to which the ruling 
divisions of our population thus far have been sub- 
jected. Equally obvious are the minor distinctive 
phases, which, on the other hand, arise from the dif- 
ferentiation of the American people by influences that, 
in widely separated districts, have acted upon their 
inhabitants from the early settlements to the present 
time. The first-named phenomena are national, while 
those of the latter class may be termed sectional ; but 
all are American, whether they appertain to the whole, 
or to the subdivisions, of our intellectual yield. 



THE AMERICAN TYPE. 



The type first suggested, that of a broadly national 
character, is plainly incomplete, and has wide room for 
maturer development. Let us measure it only at its 
worth. A restless and ill-adjusted spirit still pervades 
the heterogeneous elements of our nationality. Here 
is a country as large as all Europe, embracing zones 
as far apart, in physical attributes, as those of Norway 
and Sicily. Here are the emigrants or descendants 
of every people in Europe, — to go no farther, — and 
all their languages, and customs, and traditions, and 
modes of feeling, at one time or another, have come 
with them. Hence our unconscious habitude of va- 
riety, the disinclination to cling to one way of life 
or thought until its perfect conclusion. There is a 
ferment in new blood. The American travels, and 
at first is delighted with the color and flavor of the 
region to which he has come, but soon wearies of them, 
and pushes on to some new place where novel char- 
acteristics can be enjoyed. This is observable of all 
Anglo-Saxons, capricious yet steadfast as they are, 
but more so among ourselves than with respect to our 
British kinsmen. America has absorbed the traits 
of many lands and people ; the currents still set this 
way ; our modern intercourse with the w^orld at large 
is close and unintermitting, so that the raw ingredients 
of our national admixture are supplied quite as rapidly 
as the whirl and stir of the popular system can trit- 
urate and commingle them. It is too much, then, 
to expect that our art or song, from whatever section 
either may come, will exhibit a quality specifically 
American in the sense that the product of Italy is 
Italian, or that of France is French. At this dis- 
tance, we who watch others as we are watched our- 
selves can readily see that the same causes which make 
our civilization assume the composite type are blend- 



Its incotn- 
plctituss 
7nust be 
acknowl- 
edged. 



The na- 
tional flO" 
tnents : 



8 



EARLY AND RECENT CONDITIONS. 



To -what 
extettt ho- 
mogene- 
ous ? 



A recog- 
nizable 
type. 



Foreign 
criticism.. 



ing the politics, manners, dress, art, and letters of the 
several European countries, — and this, however dis- 
tinct their nationalities, in proportion to the growth 
of travel and interculture. But the United States are 
homogeneous in what pertains to the language and 
methods of their master-race, and to this extent their 
homogeneity is definitely assured. Concerning the 
primal influences that affect the general tone of art 
and literature, mutual communication and understand- 
ing are so perfect that any changes or advances are 
almost simultaneous throughout our territory. This 
being the situation, foreign critics are not far wrong 
in requiring that our home-product shall differ from 
their own ; that it shall be, at least, un-European, — 
manifestly of the New World, and not of the Old. 
Return to a consideration of the family likeness, 
physical and mental, which instantly is apparent to 
others as we visit the mother-land. If we ourselves 
are unconscious of it, or wonted to it ; if the air and 
fashion that we display seem to us imperceptible or 
of small account, they are not so regarded by*(!jur 
kinsmen, or by the guest who lands upon these shores. 
The stranger quickly perceives, and holds at its value, 
the general, the national, type. Material and psy- 
chological changes are correlative, and almost equally 
sure of external recognition. 

So far, therefore, from demanding absolute novelty 
in structure, language, or theme, of our home-poet, it 
is the duty of the critic to value the Americanism 
which great and small have displayed in quality of 
tone, and in faithful expression of the dominant pop- 
ular moods. Thus considered, it will be found they 
have not fallen short. Those arbiters of foreign taste 
who do not acknowledge this may be suspected of some 
unconscious insincerity. Not every mother as fail 



LOCAL PRODUCTIONS. 



and ripe as England, however affectionate, can look 
with perfect complacence upon a daughter growing 
to her own height and beauty before the world. To 
her eyes the maiden is still a child, and she owns with 
reluctance and very slowly that child's attractiveness 
and the claims of her suitors. One by one the points 
of youth and inferiority, brought against America, have 
woriv away, and now, when so many of us grant Eng- 
land this last defence of her supremacy, it is with the 
respect due a mother, and with a courtesy perchance 
no less insincere than her avowal. The new Ameri- 
canism is not so modest as to surrender any freehold or 
to be unconscious of its smallest advantages. 

The less essential novelties of structure, theme, and 
dialect already are discernible in the yield that rep- 
resents our territorial subdivision. The local flavor 
of our genre and provincial literature has long been 
unquestioned, but our conceit was not overfed by an 
acknowledgment almost wholly due to grotesque and 
humorous exploits, — a welcome such as a prince in 
his breathing-hour might give to a new-found jester 
or clown. American poetry, however, has not repre- 
sented the popular life of our continental slopes and 
corners merely in their coarser traits. These sections 
are not so isolated as the Scottish highlands, or as 
those mountain nooks in Italy, where peasant women 
contentedly whirl the spindle, and never visit the 
plains that glisten below ; yet some of them are long- 
settled and have an abiding population, with habits 
more or less confirmed. Where there is the least of 
change and interruption, and the colonial blood is 
most unmixed, the national ennui does not prevail ; 
the sentiment and instinct of the people, if limited, 
are clearly understood, and have been fairly expressed 
in poetry and prose romance. 



Minor 

character^ 

isiics. 



lO 



EARLY AND RECENT CONDITIONS. 



The new 
A meri- 
canism. 



ibli- 
canism in 
these re- 
spects is on 
trial. 



In a certain sense, it is natural for the citizen of 
so vast and various a country to find his patriotism 
and his gift of expression respond most easily to the 
appeals of his own locality. There is still a lagging 
behind full nationality, just as Federal supremacy, in 
the hearts of a great multitude, gives precedence to 
" state rights." Yet there are signs of growth toward 
an imagination in keeping with our political enlarge- 
ment. The new Americanism, with relation to liter- 
ature and the arts of beauty and construction, is seen 
in the very search for it, in the closer inspection of 
our own ground, in our more realistic method, in the 
genuine quality of our modern poetry and creative 
prose, so much more indigenous than the work of the 
Neo-Romantic English school, and presenting so fresh 
a contrast to the poetry and prose of our early peri- 
ods ; finally, in the greater value set upon our home- 
workers, upon our ventures for ourselves. It is curi- 
ous to note the minor symptoms of this change. 
As time has lessened our yearning for the mother- 
country, native Americans less fondly cling to the 
old words and traditions. The landlords who cater 
to foreign or provincial guests still give English and 
French names to their hotels, and a fresh English 
colony, after the manner of our ancestors, calls its 
village Rugby ; but the reproach of this barrenness 
of nomenclature is fast passing away, and the time 
has come when the declaration of our independence 
may be made to include the fields of literature and 
art. 

And indeed, if art, under the free system of a de- 
mocracy, does not show in time as proud a result — 
whether in the product of its disciples or in the 
wealth of its libraries and museums — as in countries 
where it is fed by governmental patronage and sub» 



RESTKICnOXS OF OUR POETS. 



II 



sidies, then our republicanism, upon its aesthetic side, 
is itself a failure. So far as poetry is concerned, I 
see that we hax'e already had the hrst period of what 
may be called, for want of a better term, a true 
American school. I see that this school was slow to 
ri>e, until suddenly a number of its leaders appeared 
at once ; that its tirst tuneful season has been com- 
pleted, so that, in the temporary pause, we now, for 
the first time, may honestly recount its triumphs. 
But that our l)-rical product has not been so obvious 
as our material grandeur, that it has put on a na- 
tional type less complete than the types of various 
sections, that it has been but a delightful promise of 
what a new song will create for us when poetry 
comes in vogue again throughout the world, — this, 
too, is not to be gainsaid. Before examining what 
we have done, let us see wdiat w^e have not been 
able to do until recently, and what not at all. It is 
time to indicate the early and later restrictions that 
have hemmed in the poets, and limited the poetr}', 
of the Western world. 



III. 



The poets themselves, naturally, would be slow to 
perceive the causes of their difficulties. The brain 
io not always conscious of its own malaise. Never- 
tlieless, I think that to each true singer, as he ar- 
rived at a period when his intellectual faculty sought 
the rationale of his successes and failures, the facts 
have been more or less apparent. The idealism of 
this people was long retarded by certain interdicts, 
and at last forced its way to expression under very 
baffling and perplexing conditions, some of which are 
even now felt. So far as the embarrassments pecul- 



Enrly .iftd 

later Re- 

strictiotis 

of the 

A Hterican 

poets. 



12 



EARLY AND RECENT CONDITIONS. 



The first 
two hun- 
dred years. 



iar to the new epoch are involved, it was a percep- 
tion of these that led me to observe their bearing on 
the poets of England, before venturing to write upon 
our own. To these matters I shall again refer, after 
some mention of the absolute barriers which shut out 
the Muses from these shores until so late a time. 

For two centuries, in truth, the situation here was 
so adverse to art, and especially to song, as to nul- 
lify even our complement to Taine's theory ; to stifle, 
or to divert to other than ideal uses,^ any exceptional 
genius that existed, and that would have made its 
way against restrictions not of themselves quite as 
exceptional. The modified results of this situation 
may still be observed. As a rider to all I have said 
of the essential superiority of art to its materials, we 
must not fail, also, to consider the repugnance of the 
general mind to disassociate things and ideas, — to 
separate the spiiit of a work from what is used for 
its construction. There is a natural expectation that 
the art of a country will convey to us something of 
the national history, aspect, social law. On the whole, 
it has been the instinct of masters to avail them- 
selves, so far as might be, in their plots, manners, 
and scenery, of the region nearest them ; a wise in- 
stinct, through which they reach closely to nature, 
and are more sure to make their work of interest 
elsewhere and afterward. Shakespeare's men are apt 
to be Englishmen, though they may figure in Illyria 



1 I am not considering the question whether a poet of the 
first rank may, or may not, find his natural vocation under the 
most adverse conditions, and overcome them ; but am trying to 
see why a general poetic movement, embracing many true poets, 
was deferred until Longfellow, Poe, Whittier, Emerson, Lowell, 
Whitman, and others of their generation appeared almost simul 
, taneously. 



THE COLONISTS. 



13 



or Rome. Nor is it entirely tlirou^h unfairness and 
caprice that tlie free range allowed to English poets 
has been denied our own. The Old World has drawn 
its countries together, like elderly people in a tacit 
alliance against the strength of youth which cannot 
return to them, the fresh, rude beauty and love which 
they may not share. There is, also, something worth 
an estimate in the division of an ocean gulf, that 
makes us like the people of a new planet ; and when 
those on the other side hear us sounding the changes 
upon familiar themes, with voices not unlike their 
own, they well may feel as if the highest qualities of 
our song were not full compensation for its lack of 
"something rich and strange." A response may fairly 
be expected to the search for novelty, to the curious 
yearning of those who look to us from across the 
seas. 

Here begin the special restrictions of an American 
poet. He represents, it is true, the music and ardor 
of a new country, of a land his race has peopled 
for two hundred and fifty years, a nation that has 
completed its first century. A new land, a new na- 
tion, yet not forced, like those which have progressed 
from barbarism to a sense of art, to create a lan- 
guage and literature of their own ; a new land with 
an old language, a new nation with all the literature 
and traditions behind it of the country from whose 
colonies it has sprung. While the thought and learn- 
ing of this people began in America just where it 
had arrived in the mother-land at the dates of the 
Jamestown and Plymouth settlements, the physical 
state and environment of Americans were those of 
men who find themselves encountering the primitive 
nature of a savage world ; with this difference, that 
they were equipped for the struggle, not as an abo-,, 



Novelty of 
the situa- 
tion. 



14 



EARLY AND RECENT CONDITIONS. 



The " Co- 
lonial " 
restric- 
tion : 



iis dissim- 
ilar effects 
upon Po- 
etry and 
Paintifig. 



riginal race, but with the logic, courage, experience, of 
the civilization behind them. All the drags, the an- 
chorage, the limitations, involved in the word " colo- 
nial " retarded a new ideality. The colonial restric- 
tion has been well determined. It made the western 
lyre, until the period covered by this survey, a mech- 
anism to echo, without fresh and true feeling, notes 
that came from over sea. It so occupied this people 
with a stern, steadfast, ingenious, finally triumphant 
contest with Nature that their epic passion was ab- 
sorbed in the clearing of forests, the bridging of rivers, 
the conquest of savage and beast, the creation of a 
free government ; and this labor is not yet ended, — 
it goes on with larger cohorts and immensely widen- 
ing power. But the imagination never dies, and when 
our first leisure came for its exercise it was awakened 
by contact with the nature thus tamed, — by commun- 
ion with the broadest panorama of woods and hills 
and waters, under the most radiant skies, that civil- 
ized man has ever found himself confronting. Pio- 
neers in art and poetry here caught their inspiration, 
and naturally the field of painting was the first to 
give token of novel results. The very ease with 
which books containing the world's best literature 
were obtainable in the backvv'oods made our early 
writers copyists. The painters, meanwhile, had to la- 
ment the absence of galleries in this country, and 
their own inability to go abroad and study. Thrown 
upon themselves, and deficient in technical knowl- 
edge, they sought for models in the nature about 
them ; and thus began our landscape-school of paint- 
ing, the work of which, however rude and defective, 
was more original than the verse wherewith it was 
contemporary. 

A poet of the first rank is not given to every coun« 



A BARR/':iy TIME. 



15 



try, nor to every age. I'ut poets of gifts approaching Latent^en,' 
those of our li\ing favorites doubtless have been born '"^ ""^ '/^ 

^ be coiLSid' 

in America, according to Nature's average, at differ- ercd. 
ent times of our history. Until recently, the stimu- 
lants of their genius must have been wanting. It 
may be that the people had no real need of them, 
and song and art, like invention, come not without 
necessity. What poetry was latent here and there 
does not concern us. The stone on which our colo- 
nial life was founded was frigid as an arctic boulder, 
— tliere was no molecular motion to give out life and 
heat. Who were the mute, inglorious Miltons .'' Of 
what kind is the verse that was produced .'' Does it 
move us ? Is it poetry .? However fine the cast of 
individuals, the effect of a perpetual contest with the 
elemental, often sinister, always gigantic forces of a 
new continent would be so adverse to art, so directly 
in the line of necessity and temporal gain, as to sti- 
fle their poetic fire, to develop a heroism that was 
stolid and unimaginative, to mark persons and com- 
munities with sternness and angularity, leading them 
to a homely gauge of values, not wont to esteem the 
ideal at its true worth. The aspiration of a refined 
nature would seem to the multitude foolishness and a 
stumbling-block. For a prolonged season the art of ■ Colonial 
writing verse was almost solely a luxury of the pro- ^'^ "''^^^■^' 
fessional classes in America, and its relics bear wit- 
ness to their pedantry and dulness. It is not to the 
wigged and gowned that we instinctively listen for 
the music and freedom of creative song. And if 
poetry even in England, from the middle of the sev- 
enteenth century to the close of the eighteenth, stu- 
pidly fashioned itself upon the models of worn-out 
schools, how should it do more in England's colo- 
nies, that brought hither certain shoots of taste and 



i6 



EARLY AND RECENT CONDITIONS. 



Prolonged 
sterility. 



The first 
stages of 
Republi- 
canism 
apposed to 
ideal art. 



d leveller. 



learning from the Old World, and found it hard to 
protect them at all in the sterile wild-woods of the 
New? 

Such was the nature of the barriers' which, in the 
early and later colonial periods, absolutely defied the 
overleaping of a single notable poet. We find little 
of more significance in the transition era of the Rev- 
olution, although a nation took on life. No poetry 
was begotten in the rage of that heroic strife ; its hu- 
mor, hatred, hope, suffering, prophecy, were feebly 
uttered, as far as verse w^as concerned, in the mode 
and language inherited years before from the coarsest 
English satirists. There came at last a time when 
the nation felt itself in vigorous youth, and began to 
have a song. Some few original notes were heard 
among our pipings. The positive barriers were broken, 
and in their stead came the restrictions that are felt 
in some degree down to the present time. 

At the outset it may be said of Republicanism it- 
self — in which our pride and faith are based, and 
which we trust is ultimately to promote a literature 
and an art not below the standard of our bravest 
hope — that it originally somewhat lessened the ardor 
of our poets, or kept this within temperate bounds. 
There was a craving for ideality of a certain kind, 
and in our liberal regions the sense of utility was not 
the sole controlling power. There was a wide man- 
ifestation of that which bears to pure ideality an in- 
ferior relationship. Our system diffused the intelli- 
gence which lifts our people quite above the dulness 
and stolidity of the middle classes elsewhere, but did 
not speedily bring them to the pitch of high emotion. 
It is a leveller, and in its early stages raises a multi- 
tude to the level of the commonplace ; so that there 
have been few tall heads of grain above the even field. 



OUR REPUBLICANISM. 



17 



The general independence and comfort have not bred 
those dramatic elements which imply conditions of 
splendor and squalor, glory and shame, triumph and 
despair. In their stead we have the spirit of the Amer- 
ican homesteads, and the loss to the artist of some 
darker contrast, that would make their virtue and piety 
more inspiring, certainly is their gain. In no other 
country are there so many happy little households, — 
althouiih there is a curious foreiirn belief to the con- 
trar^-, derived from travelling acquaintanceship. This 
must be so in the one land where every man can own 
a portion of the soil and be a freeholder, and where 
a man's toil meets no doubtful reward. The popular 
thrift and freedom, joined with the necessity for labor 
to steadily maintain them, are not at first productive 
of the tragic or entrancing dreams of effective art. 
Wisely bettering their material chances, men are too 
busy to feel a spiritual w^ant. And the labor of our 
representative men is so extended and heroic as of 
itself to feed the popular imagination. In default of 
Homer, we at least have Hector and Achilles ; and 
the peerless exploits of our engineers, capitalists, dis- 
coverers, speak louder than a minstrel's words. In 
all this amazing drama of triumphant effort and or- 
ganization ; in the adjustment of our political theory, 
dependent on statesmanship, and leading to orator}^ 
and journalism rather than to art and song; in the 
despotism of our social unwritten law that an Amer- 
ican must be a good citizen first of all, and that the 
first duties of a citizen are to rear and maintain a 
family ; in the implied doubt as to the sanity of en- 
during privations for the sake of the ideal, when, by 
deserting it, a practical success may be had, — amid 
all this the man of genius has too often betaken him- 
self to the work of his neighbors, and those who keep 
2 



The A nier- 
iatn home* 
steiid. 



Material 
effort. 



i8 



EARLY AND RECENT CONDITIONS. 



Diffusio7i 
of tJie com- 
monplace. 



Technical 

difficulties; 
"which, 
however, 
do not 
greatly af- 
fect the lyr- 
ic foet. 



To "what 
Vctent the 



faith with the Muse have found themselves perplexed 
and out of time. Nevertheless, I repeat that, up to 
a certain grade, our people have required their poetry, 
— just as they will have their votes, their seats in 
church, their county papers, and the piano or melo- 
deon in every house. A throng of minor singers have 
answered to the demand with very natural and unaf- 
fected voices. The select few, whose efforts placed 
them above their comrades, often have suffered from 
the undue favor awarded their minor and ordinary 
productions. 

These adverse influences, belonging to the soil and 
air, perhaps have not been so directly comprehended 
by the American poet as the obvious and technical 
impediments which had force when he essayed a sus- 
tained and novel work. 

In considering these, let us acknowledge that they 
do not greatly concern the emotional and lyric poet. 
He is at no loss for a method or a theme ; the latter 
is at once the cause and modulator of his song. Per- 
sonal joys and griefs, special occurrences in history 
or related to the individual life, — these have inspired, 
and do inspire, the briefer poems, the lyrics which 
still make up the choicest portion of our verse. Their 
range is wide, from the simple fireside ballad to the 
impassioned ode, and my estimate of their remarkable 
freshness and variety will be given more fully here- 
after. At present I would say that among them are 
many admirable of their kind, and that the relative 
number of these is not less than can be found in the 
popular verse of other lands. An American critic fails 
in discernment or independence who does not see this 
and avow it. 

But, while the lyrical songster need not cast about 
for a subject, and does not even look into his heart 



PRIMITIVE ABSENCE OE THEME. 



19 



to write, — for his heart has already moved him, — 
the ambitious poet is best equipped for a larger ef- 
fort by some adequate theme awaiting his hand. The 
moment arrives when poets of the upper cast desire 
to foresfo their studies and l^rief l\Tical llijlits, and to 
produce the composite and heroic works that rank as 
masterpieces. These leaders often have been arrested, 
with respect to romantic or inventive structures, by a 
scarcity of home-themes, no less than by the lack of 
sharp dramatic contrast in our equable American life. 
I am aware that this statement frequently is derided, 
and that many poets, while realizing that their prod- 
uct is too meagre, will not acknowledge its force. 
Others, and these among our foremost, who have 
thought to analyze their experience, confess that it 
is true in no small measure, and ha\'e stated this 
over their own hands. 

Up to a recent date, absence of theme for a na- 
tional masterpiece, for a work belonging to our own 
atmosphere and history, has been a result of the 
condition under which we started. Original art is 
long deferred among a people cultured at the outset. 
A writer has well said that " the cause of the ab- 
sence of the legendary and poetic in our early his- 
tory may be attributed to the mental development 
of the colonists, who had already passed through 
that historic stage." They started at once with both 
church and school-house. The imagination was con- 
trolled by precedent, and " Art was cheated of its 
birthright." They made little history in a dramatic 
sense. What there was of the poetic or wondrous in 
their arduous compelling life had a local range, — 
such as the trials for witchcraft, finely utilized by New 
England's great romancer, and too inadequately, it 
must be owned, by her most famous poet. In Park- 



more am- 
bitions 
have /fit 
t/u'ir 
weight. 



Primitive 
absence of 
the Die. 



Otis, in 
" Sacred 
and Con- 
structive 
Art.'' 



20 



EARLY AND RECENT CONDITIONS. 



" Evange- 



man's elegant survey of certain picturesque epochs in 
colonial history, the feminine element, essential to 
complete dramatic quality, is usually wanting ; in 
other annals, like those of Spanish-American adven- 
ture, it scarcely appears at all. American antiquity 
is a rude settler's antiquity ; a homely fashion that 
palls, because not long out of date ; a story every- 
where the same, — furnishing at times the basis of 
some exquisite idyl, like *' Evangeline," but for none 
too many of the class, " Evangeline " still remains 
the most notable of the longer American poems ; 
and how much of that is otherwise than scenic and 
idyllic, and how much of it does not fit the story to 
the landscape, rather than the landscape to the story ? 
No material, no stirring theme, with all your freedom, 
your conquest, your noble woods and waters, your 
westward spread of men ! These are motives, acces- 
sories, atmosphere, often grander in magnitude than 
elsewhere to be found, but not perforce more new. 
The poetic instinct does not always hold the macro- 
cosm superior to the microcosm, the prairie to the 
plain of Marathon, the Hudson to the Cephisus or 
the Tweed. As for latter-day history, this is not far 
enough removed. From the Revolution to the Civil 
War, the incidents of our life and passion are so re- 
cent and so plainly recorded as to gather no lumi- 
nous halo from the too slight distance at which we 
observe them. The true poet will profit by them to 
the uttermost ; the limits are to be overcome, but 
still are limits and in his way. He is thrown upon 
the necessity of inventing dramatic themes for the 
broader range of poetic venture. This the great poets 
always have avoided, for the product of such inven- 
tion usually has seemed artificial and remote from 
human concern. 



Indistinct 
lack- 



LACK OF BACKGROUND. 



21 



Bear in mind, also, that our wide-awake people are 
removed, not only from the supcrstilions that were a 
religion to our forefathers, but from the wondercraft 
and simple faith prev^ailing among the common folk 
of other lands than our own. The beautifying lens 
of fancy has dropped from our eyes. Where are our 
forest and river legends, our Lorelei, our Venusberg, 
our elves and kobolds ? We have old-time customs 
and traditions, and they are quaint and dear to us, but 
their atmosphere is not one in which we freely move. 
Just so with our heroism. No national changes and 
struggles have been of more worth than our own, but 
critics are not far wrong who point out that, how- 
ever lofty the action and spirit of our latest crisis, 
heroism is not with us so much the chief business 
that one must be always " enthusiastic and on guard." 
One of our poets aims to be especially national. He 
sings, upon theory, as the American bard must sing 
when the years have died away. The result is a 
striking assumption of what can only come of itself, 
and after long time be past ; a disjointed series of 
kaleidoscopic pieces, not constituting a master-work, 
but, with all their strength and weakness, as unsatis- 
factory as the ill-assorted elements which he strives 
to represent. Yet, even in this effort, he is represent- 
ative and a personage of mark, if not precisely in the 
direction of his own choice and assurance. 

More clearly to understand how far, and in what 
way, our poets have felt the lack of background, of 
social contrasts, and of legendary and specific inci- 
dent, we may observe the literature of some region 
where different conditions exist. In an isolated coun- 
try of established growth and quality, a native genius 
soon discovers his tendency and proper field. 

Look at Scotland. Her national melodies were 



Discn- 
c/iattt- 
vients. 



Thefor- 
chig pr(y 
cess. 



22 



EARLY AND RECENT CONDITIONS. 



An illus- 
tration by 
contrast. 



The poefs 
food and 
fame. 



ready and waiting for Burns ; her legends, history, 
traditions, for Walter Scott The popular tongue, cos- 
tumes, manners, all distinctively and picturesquely her 
own, affect the entire outcome of her song and art„ 
Embraced in English literature, her literature is so un- 
English that it affords the paradigm we need. Enter 
the cathedral in Glasgow. Within the last thirty 
years that edifice has been refitted throughout with 
stained glass, contributed by the ancient families and 
clans. What associations are called up by the de- 
vices upon the windows in the chancel and nave, and 
in the impressive crypt below ! Among all the shields 
and names, — those of Sterling, Hay, Douglas, Mont- 
rose, Campbell, Montgomerie, Lawrie, Buccleuch, 
Hamilton, — not one that is not utterly, purely Scot- 
tish. Even in our oldest and most characteristic sec- 
tions in Virginia or New England, influences like 
these are discovered to no such extent. In a cer- 
tain sense, they are not only influences, but aids : 
they move, they stimulate, they belong to the life and 
memory of the native poet, and he avails himself of 
them without effort or consciousness. Not that they 
are the essential, the imperative aids. But to be 
without them is a restriction, and one which our first 
genuine school of poets has had more or less to en- 
dure. 

Strange, indeed, if the material wants of New 
World life, its utilitarian test of values, and the gen- 
eral conditions of a primitive democracy had not 
forced our early idealists into a struggle for existence 
which even the sturdiest found it hard to prolong. 
Two things are essential to the poetic aspiration that 
results in fine achievement : the sympathetic applause 
which ministers to the last infirmity of noble minds, 
and the common wage that enables a laborer to do 



COPYRIGHT. 



23 



his work. The rewards of authorship lia\'e l)cen suf- 
ficiently tlouhtful and varyini; in iImrs l)cfore our 
own. In older lands, the poet, like his predecessor 
the minstrel, was at least protected and nourished by 
the good or great to whom he dedicated his song. 
Happily this kind of support was from the hrst im- 
practicable in a hberal republic. But it long was im- 
possible, on material grounds alone, — although en- 
thusiasts might attempt to li\e upon love and fame 
— that any vigorous and prevailing Hood of poesy 
should be sustained in toiling, practical, frugal Amer- 
ica. We now know that in art, as in life, ideal pro- 
ductiveness follows, and does not precede, material 
security and wealth. The most creative eras of his- 
toric lands were those when their cities were the rich- 
est, when their galleons sought out distant ports, and 
their nobles and burgesses, sure of life's needs, craved 
for the luxuries of taste and emotion. Literature 
thrives as a means of subsistence, nor is poetry an 
exception to the rule. The supply answers to the de- 
mand. Not long ago in this country, few books, ex- 
cept school-books, were required by the people ; and 
how should poetry, that looked from the printed page 
for its welcome and sustenance, be naturally com- 
posed ? We are speaking of an ethereal art, but 
quietly examining the law of its activity. 

It is, moreover, in America that the popular in- 
stinct, which resists whatever is asserted to be a tax 
upon knowledge, has worked with peculiar force 
against the development of a home-school. So long 
as our purveyors could avail themselves without cost 
or hindrance of foreign master-works, they scarcely 
could be expected to risk their means in behalf of 
native authorship. Pure idealists, men like Poe and 
Hawthorne, are little able to push their own fortunes. 



Laiv of 
production. 



The copy- 
rii^ht qiies' 
Hon. 



24 



EARLY AND RECENT CONDITIONS. 



Interna- 
tional 
copyright. 



Disastrous 
iffect upon 
A merican 
literature. 



Until a state of law shall exist that will induce 
American publishers, driven from their distant for- 
aging-grounds, to seek for genius at home and make 
it available, the support of our authors will not be 
so assured as to tend " in the end to the advance- 
ment of literature." International copyright at least 
would have made it feasible for the poet to earn his 
living by general literary work, and to reserve some 
heart and thought for his nobler calling. Now, when 
an organized movement at last seems under way to- 
ward copyright reform, it still is so hampered with 
reservations and class-interests that many ask whether 
it were not better to have no change at all than to 
have one that is partial, and that may postpone in- 
definitely the one thing needful, to wit : honest rec- 
ognition of an author's right of property in his own 
creations, without any more limits of space and time 
than those appertaining to other kinds of estate. 

Literature verily has been almost the sole product 
of human labor that has not been rated as the last- 
ing property of the producer and his heirs or assigns. 
This want of permanent copyright has borne severely 
upon authors in all countries, but most severely upon 
those of America, who have had to await the forma- 
tion of public taste, to create their audiences, and 
who, while willing to suffer in their own persons, 
are less ready to devote lifetimes to the production 
of what will be valueless to those whom they hold 
most dear. The want of international copyright has 
been a wrong to our brother-writers in Europe. Their 
complaints are just ; their cry has gone up for years. 
Great as the spoliations have been which they have 
endured, the effect upon our native literature and au- 
thorship has been far more disastrous. Our authors 
themselves do not comprehend it. A few of the great 



// M ERICA N CRITICISM. 



25 



publishing houses, grown rich upon the system of free 
reprints, of late have felt this wrong, and the men of 
heart and culture who control tiiem are generously 
atoning for it. We see them leaders in artistic and 
literary movements, the friends of authors and artists, 
receiving for their public and private humanities our 
warmest tributes of honor and affection. It is said 
that every wrong in this world is surely, if slowly, 
righted ; and the wrongs of authors doubtless will be 
set right. But who shall pick up water spilled to the 
ground ? The w-riters of a new generation will never 
realize how bitter was the bread eaten by those who 
went before them and made their paths straight. 

Critical periods are sometimes uncreative, yet there 
is little doubt that our poetry has suffered, also, from 
the lack of those high and exquisite standards of criti- 
cism which have been established in older lands. The 
poet, the artist, alike need the correction of a fine cen- 
sorship and the tonic of that just appreciation w-hich 
is the promise of fame. American verse, within re- 
cent memor}^, has experienced, first, a popular favor 
gained by its weakest and most effeminate sentiment; 
and, secondly, a rude exaggeration of its defects, a re- 
fusal to acknowledge its value as compared with that 
of the foreign product, or to consider its higher as- 
pirations as practicable and worthy of respect. The 
people at large have passed from sham emotion to 
irreverence, and to a relish for what is flippant and 
ephemeral. Then, too, our most sincere and pains- 
taking authorities often seem at a loss to estimate 
the nature of art, and criticise it from metaphysical 
or doctrinarian points of view. The poet or painter 
feels the wrong and the error, and, though he makes 
no complaint, they tell upon his buoyancy and appli- 
cation. Only of late have we begun to look for criti- 



UnsatiS" 
factory 
tests of 
merit. 



26 



EARLY AND RECENT CONDITIONS. 



Criticism 
as it should 
be. ■ 



These local 
and printi- 
tive diffi- 
culties are 
now suc- 
ceeded by 
the getier- 
al restric- 
tions of the 
.^w era. 



cism which appHes both knowledge and self-knowl= 
edge to the test ; which is penetrative and dexterous, 
but probes only to cure ; which enters into the soul 
and purpose of a work, and considers every factor 
that makes it what it is ; — the criticism which, above 
all, esteems it a cardinal sin to suffer a verdict to be 
tainted by private dislike, or by partisanship and the 
instinct of battle with an opposing clique or school. 
Such criticism is now essayed, but often is too much 
occupied with foreign or recondite subjects to search 
out and foster what is of worth among ourselves. 



IV. 

These, it seems to me, have been the local and or- 
ganic difficulties with which the American poet, wit- 
tingly or unwittingly, has had to contend. They are 
not figments of the brain ; their force has been real ; 
time and national development alone have lessened 
them ; during the continuation of their serious pres- 
sure the rise of poetry was delayed. It is curious to 
note that, just as their adverse influence began to pass 
away, a new class of restrictions came in play through- 
out the enlightened world, affecting our own idealists 
in common with those of the mother-land. When I 
long since began to think of the present work, I saw 
that the modern intellectual change was so absolute 
that I was compelled to seek for the general conditions 
of the period, and to attempt a review of the poets 
of England before entering upon our home-field, in 
order to comprehend justly the effect of the new at- 
mosphere upon the spirit of poetry itself. In the first 
chapter of the Victorian Poets, certain perplexing ele- 
ments are considered which have made the recent 
time one to which a hackneyed word, " transitional," 



THE MODERX WORLD. 



27 



is more correctly applied than to any former period. 
The new learning — the passage from the childlike 
and phenomenal way of regarding things to the ab- 
solute, scientific penetration of their true entities and 
relations — has directly told upon the work of the poet, 
requiring new language, imagery, invention, as he 
adapts himself to a deeper purpose and the hope of 
a sublimer faith. I have pointed out, as well, the 
struggles, devices, defeats, and victories of the Eng- 
lish minstrels under the stress of latter-day iconoclasm 
and the invincible demands of modern thought ; tak- 
ing into account, also, the minor and obvious forces 
antagonistic to a devoted pursuit of the ideal, — - among 
the rest the world's material activity, displayed in la- 
bor, invention, construction, — the world's realistic 
eagerness, that makes of the newspaper, the novel, 
and the bulletins of science the food and outlets of 
the imagination, and renders mankind intent alone 
upon each day's labor, so to hasten on the golden 
year. Reluctant to confront these ceaseless and per- 
turbing manifestations, until out of them the world 
shall have derived a more assured philosophy, many 
of the latest singers have ignored them altogether : 
the weaker busying themselves with mere dilettante- 
ism and the technique of their vocation, the nobler 
being devoted to the worship of beauty pure and sim- 
ple, and often going back to its early revelations and 
the antique forms. 

V. 

These generic burdens of the age itself have borne 
even more severely upon American idealists than upon 
their transatlantic brethren. Yet it was when they 
first began to have their weight, and not until then. 



Cp. ''Vic- 
torian Po- 
ets " ; //. 
7-21. 



Daiim at 
last. 



28 



EARLY AND RECENT CONDITIONS. 



Special ad- 
vantages 
of our 
home-Poets. 



A ■merica7i 
landscape. 



National 
feeling 



that the true light of Poetry in America ventured to 
appear. Under the very shadow of the whirlwind it 
brightened into dawn. Possibly the new learning was 
most of all needed here, as an offset to puritanism, 
superstition, and sentimentalism in its mawkish forms^. 
Honest fact and a search for our own resources gave 
an impulse to healthy inspiration. But the opportu- 
nity for the achievements of our leading poets, so fa- 
mous and beloved in their hoary years, really came 
when the specific restrictions, to which so much space 
has been here devoted, at last yielded measurably to 
time and national progress. Coincidently with their 
decline, certain positive aids to our lyrical genius be- 
came apparent, and were felt, and aroused to joyous 
activity its instinct, courage, and imagination. 

First of all, as I have shown, the American with 
an eye for natural beauty, led by his seclusion to close 
and musing observation, had a subject for poetic ex- 
pression in the landscape of the New World, by turns 
impressive, bewildering, reposeful, but always beauti- 
ful and strong. If its primeval aspect stupefied the 
toiling settlers, while its grandeur seemed to belittle 
humanity and to defer the proper study of mankind, 
it afterward compelled our ideal recognition, and in- 
spired the early and reverent anthems of the father 
of our choir. Next, and most vital of the elements 
required for the promotion of a home-school, a na- 
tional feeling grew up when the compactness and 
growth of the United States, as a nation, became as- 
sured. Half a century was needed to bring this feel- 
ing to the blossoming form of art. Meanwhile, it 
had been strengthening and finding expression in other 
ways ; for example, in the patriotic eloquence which 
marked our oratory, and which warmed the blood and 
I stirred the impulse of many a poetic youth, as he read 



AIDS OF OUR POETS. 



29 



in his school-books the speeches of the founders and 
preservers of Uberty. Hence our strongest emotional 
traits, — love of freedom, hatred of oppression, respect 
for ancestral faith, the sense of independence which 
makes an American stand erect and believe himself 
the peer of any man, the audacity and ambition found 
among no other people ; finally, an adventurous habit 
of experimenting without much regard to precedent 
or training. Out of some of these traits came, it is 
true, a commonplace and widely scattered product in 
literature. But if a host of writers ended in medioc- 
rity, this, too, was in the order of evolution. The 
feeble books of one generation are often horn-books 
for the people, the promise and cause of better work 
in the next. The late Civil War w^as not of itself an 
incentive to good poetry and art, nor directly pro- 
ductive of them. Such disorders seldom are ; action 
is a substitute for the ideal, and the thinker's or 
dreamer's life seems ignoble and repugnant. But we 
shall see that the moral and emotional conflicts pre- 
ceding the war, and leading to it, were largely stim- 
ulating to poetic ardor ; they broke into expression, 
and buoyed with earnest and fervid sentiment our 
heroic verse. Lastly, it must be observed that, about 
the time from which I date the appearance of a group 
of noteworthy poets, a material support w^as afforded 
to ideal work. Both artists and writers began to be 
paid, and found their respective gifts to some extent 
a means of subsistence. American publishers, as I 
have said, took heart, and made ventures in behalf 
of our own literature. Journalism also lent its aid, 
paying critical attention to native authors, and en- 
abling not a few of them to gain a foothold by labor 
upon the great newspapers and magazines. All these 
aids, I repeat, came into service after the scientific 



Growth o) 
the mar- 
ket. 



30 



EARLY AND RECENT CONDITIONS. 



<4 dvent of 
» true po- 
ntic school. 



restraint of the modern period began to have weight. 
They assisted us to bear up against it, and alleviated 
the special restrictions of an earlier time. The sweet 
and various measures of a band of genuine singers 
at length were heard, and found an audience in what- 
soever regions know the English tongue. American 
poetry took its place in literature, and entered upon 
a first term, now brought to an end, and constitut- 
ing the main field of this review. 



CHAPTER II 



GROWTH OF THE AMERICAN SCHOOL. 



I. 

HAVING given an outline of the situation which 
rendered the new country, in the earUer pe- 
riods of settlement, an untoward region for the pur- 
suit of song, and also of the specific aids which at 
last have enabled America to have some voice and 
inspiration of her own, I now wish to glance at the 
actual record of her lyrical exploits that culminated 
with the rise of the group of poets to whom this work 
is chiefly devoted. To do this minutely would re- 
quire us to travel over dreary wastes indeed, though 
gaining rest at last upon the borders of a land of 
promise. From w^hat has been wTitten, I shall rightly 
be understood to agree with Mr. Whipple in his state- 
ment that the course of our literature has been, upon 
the whole, subsidiary to the general movement of the 
American mind ; that our imagination has found ex- 
ercise in the subjugation of a continent, in establish- 
ing liberty, in war, politics, and government, — above 
all, in the inventive and constructive energy and the 
financial boldness needed to develop and control the 
material heritage which has fallen to us. But to this 
let me add that the course of our poetry, for the same 
reasons, was long subsidiary to the course of other 
literature, — at once, or by turns, to our theological, 
political, and educational achievements in prose, and 



A retro- 
spective 
sjnnvtary. 
1607-1B60. 



''The First 
Cetitiiry oj 
the Repub- 
lic " ; 
Harper^s 
Mag.f 1S76. 



32 



GROWTH OF THE AMERICAN SCHOOL, 



A uthori- 
iies. 



Prof. 

Moses Coit 
Tyler's re- 
view of the 
Colo7iial 
periods. 



to those in the departments of historical narrative and 
romance. 

The means for a survey of the early waste, and of 
its few and unimportant oases, are to be found in the 
libraries of collectors, and in the compilations of the 
Duyckincks, Griswold, and others, who have made 
for us as cheery a showing as they could. But a 
reader who has not access to the rare books of a 
succession of by-gone authors gains with more satis- 
faction a correct idea of their worth and purport by 
the study of such a work as Professor Tyler's " HiS' 
tory of American Literature." He well may avail 
himself, so far as it is completed, of a critical digest 
whose facts will not be gainsaid, a clear and whole- 
some exposition of our early literature, presenting judg- 
ments and inferences with which he usually must be 
in accord. It is a result of scholarly labor, closely 
examining the field, and failing not to detect what- 
ever may be found of value in those new planta- 
tions. Can this mould of the Colonial period be 
touched with the sunlight of to-day? Can these dry 
bones live ? Yes, under the hands of a man with 
the patience, enthusiasm, and kindly humor of their 
historian, to whom American literature is so indebted 
for this review of its progress that his name will be 
enviably connected with it henceforth. 

And in the two large volumes, covering our first 
and second periods, more than a century and a half, 
— -from 1607 to 1765, — the product of the poets ap 
pears so valueless and meagre that, if the narrative 
depended on them alone, there would be no great rea- 
son for its compilation. A larger proportion of edu- 
cated men belonged to the early colonies than is to b? 
found elsewhere upon the rolls of emigration. Nearly 
all writers then wrote verse, at first printing theix 



PURITAN RHYMESTERS. 



33 



works in London, and afterward by means of the few 
and meanly furnished presses along this coast. These 
folk were simply third-rate British rhymesters, who 
copied the pedantry of the tamest period known. 
The only marks of. distinction between their prose 
and verse were that, while the former might be dull, 
the latter must be, and must pay a stilted regard to 
measure and rhyme. How hard for our amiable his- 
torian to make poetical finds that can lighten the 
pages of his record ! How he seizes upon some 
promising estray, — like the anonymous ode on the 
death of picturesque Nat. Bacon, like Norton's "Fu- 
neral Elegy " upon Mistress Anne Bradstreet, or Urian 
Oakes's upon Thomas Shepard, — and makes the most 
of it ! Surely a time that fed its imagination with the 
offerings of the "Tenth Muse," and expressed relig- 
ious exaltation in those measures of the Bay Psahn 
Book that seem to break from a cow's horn or a 
Roundhead's nose, and in the lyrical damnations of 
Michael Wigglesworth, — such a time, from its begin- 
ning with George Sandys even to the generation that 
founded hopes of a native drama upon the genius of 
Thomas Godfrey, had derived few creative impulses 
from its own experience, and could give no real inti- 
mation of a national future. This was a time which 
now seems more venerable to us than the daylight 
eras of ancient civilization, — drearily old-fashioned, 
like its town halls and college barracks, still remain- 
ing, all the older and mouldier because they are not 
antique. To its very close, when the different colo- 
nies began to move toward cohesion, the most of it 
seems to me night, — utter night. Its poetical relics 
are but the curios of a museum, — the queer and ugly 
specimens of an unhistoric age. 

Manifestly, and as at a later time, New England 
3 



OcU oil tht 
Death of 
Nathaniel 
Bacon : 
1676. 

yohn Nor- 
ton : 1651- 
17 16. 

Urian 
Oakes : 
1631-81. 

Anne 
Brad- 
street : 
1612-72. 

T/te ''Bay 

Psalm 

Book " : 

Catn- 

bridgCf 

1640. 

Micltael 
Wiggles- 
worth : 
1631-1705. 

Sandys^ 
the trans- 
lator 0/ 
Ovid : 
1577-1644. 

Thomas 
Godfrey : 
1736-63. 

A ray/ess 
period. 



Neiv Eng- 



34 



GROWTH OF THE AMERICAN SCHOOL. 



land in the 
vatt. 



The Early 
Chroni- 
clers, 



Histori- 
ans. 



Pivines. 



The Mid- 



claimed the lead in whatsoever there was of thought, 
or wit, or fancy ; and Cambridge even then had her 
poets, who accounted themselves true children of Par- 
nassus. Tyler plainly shows how the feudal policy 
of dispersion, and a contempt for book-learning as 
compared with active life, placed a ban upon letters 
in Virginia ; while the New England policy of numer- 
ical and intellectual concentration brought forward 
the learned men of that region, and made its colo- 
nists a literary people from the first. In spite of their 
moroseness, pedantry, asceticism, a lurking perception 
of beauty, an aesthetic sensibility, was to be found 
among them. But the manifest, the sincere genius of 
the colonies is diplayed elsewhere than in their labo- 
rious verse. Noble English and a simple, heroic 
wonder give zest to the writings of the early chron- 
iclers, the annals of discovery and adventure. Such 
traits distinguish the narratives of the gallant and 
poetic Captain John Smith, and of Strachey, whose 
picture of a storm and wreck in the Bermudas so 
roused the spirit that conceived " The Tempest." 
They pervade the memorials of Bradford and Win- 
throp, of Johnson and Gookin, of Francis Higginson 
and Winslow and William Wood. There are power 
and imagination in the discourses of the great preach- 
ers, — Hooker, Cotton, Roger Williams, Oakes, — who 
founded a dominion of the pulpit that was not shaken 
until after the time of Edwards and Byles. Verse- 
making was but the foible of the colonial New Eng- 
landers ; law, religious fervor, superstition, were then 
the strength of life ; and the time that produced In- 
crease and Cotton Mather fostered a progeny quite 
as striking and characteristic as the melodists of our 
late Arcadian morn. 

When the Middle Colonies began to have a litera- 



REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD. 



ture, it was natural that the chief writers — men Qi\dieCoio- 
tlie learned professions, busied in affairs, and already 



nies. 



feeling; that instinct of government which animates 
territorial centres — should be publicists, setting forth 
the principles of order, economy, and social weal. The 
colonial separation ended ; the national niovement be- 
gan with stormy agitation, and progressed to union in 
council and war. With the Revolution came not only 
the great orators, but an outburst, otherwise than tune- 
ful, of patriotic ballads, songs, and doggerel satires, — 
to all of which, at this distance, the sounds of the 
Continental fife and drum seem a fitting accompani- 
ment. Nor did staid and learned personages disdain 
to pay homage to the precept of Andrew Fletcher, 
and to supplement the new-born national ardor by the 
aid of their muses. Trumbull's M'Fhigal is a work 
that will not go quite out of repute. It still speaks 
well for the character, wit, and facility of the staunch 
and acute author, and shows genuine originality al- 
though written after a model. Not even " Hudibras " 
more aptly seizes upon the ludicrous phases of a tur- 
bulent epoch. In New York, bluff Captain Freneau, 
mariner, journalist, and poet, proved himself the ready 
laureate of the war. Read the story of his impetuous 
life, and look through the collection of his ditties and 
poems, with their pretentious defects and unwittingly 
clever touches. A strange and serio-comic medley they 
are, and no less a varied representation of the poetic 
standards reached in America a hundred years ago. 
Among the relics which I call to mind of the jin- 
gling verse produced in quantity by Treat Paine and 
his contemporaries, there is scarcely a lyric that 
breathes what we now recognize as the essential po- 
etic spirit, excepting five or six of Freneau's, such 
as "The Wild Honeysuckle," "The Parting Glass," 



Revolu- 
iiufuiry 
Period: 
1765-S7. 



Johti 

Trutnbull' 

1750-1831. 



Philip 
Freneau '. 
1752-1832. 



Rhyme- 
sters of his 
time. 



36 



GROWTH OF THE AMERICAN SCHOOL. 



Tyler : 
1757-1826. 

W^illiam 
JDunlap : 
1766-1839. 

1787-1815. 



Timothy 
Dwight : 
1752-1817. 

Joel Bar- 
low: 1755- 
1812. 

Patriotic 
ditties. 



A natural 
(ourse of 
develop- 
ment. 



" To a Honey Bee " (which last is good enough to 
be Landor's), and a delicate little song, by John Shaw^ 
of Maryland, entitled " Who has Robbed the Ocean 
Cave t " Practical efforts, however, were made in the 
composition and production of native dramas, by Ty- 
ler and Dunlap, ■ — our earliest playwrights, — in Bos- 
ton and New York respectively. 

After the close of the Revolution, and until the 
War of 18 1 2, the genius of our people was devoted to 
the establishment, through peaceful labor, of the secu- 
rity and resources which should be the first-fruits of 
a conflict for independence. Writers occupied them- 
selves with analyzing the science of government, its 
principles and practice. No American library, how- 
ever, was complete without copies of Dr. Dwight's his- 
torico-didactic masterpiece, Greenfield Hill, and Joel 
Barlow's quarto epic. The Columbiad. The popular 
ear was content with patriotic songs, among them 
"Hail Columbia," which owed their general adoption, 
like a successor, " The Star-Spangled Banner," to the 
music that carried them and to an early possession 
of the field. It was not until peace, for a second 
time, became a habit that the imagination of a young 
people, assured of nationality, slowly found expres- 
sion upon the written page. In view of the condi- 
tions already described, what traits might we reason- 
ably expect would characterize poetic effort at this 
stage of development ? 

First, — and although the form and ideal of Amer- 
ican verse still should correspond, like all our early 
fashions, to the modes prevailing in England, — it 
would seem that, gradually, poets should appear, ham- 
pered by this instinct of correspondence, and not quite 
knowing or daring to be original, yet possessing graces 
and thoughts of their own, and looking at things, aftei 



PIERPONT. — DANA.—ALLSTON. 



Zl 



ail, In a different way from the English ; that they 
should seek for home themes, and study their sur- 
roundings, most likely in a doubtful and groping man- 
ner ; that a diversity of subject, thought, and language 
should be obserxed in the distinct sections of the re- 
public, — the poets of the South being more courtly 
and romantic, and those of the Middle States more 
national and more upon the search for aboriginal and 
historical flavor ; that local successes should be marked 
where there was the least inflow of new foreign ele- 
ments, the sincerest faith, the most intelligent thought; 
that poetry should be the more learned, the more sub- 
tle and earnest, in the scholarly region of the East, 
and that poets should thrive best there, where the 
practice of literature had long obtained, — since all 
forms of art require more time for growth than other 
products of national organization. 

Somewhat after this wise, in fact, as we recur to 
the earliest promise of an American school, we find 
that it began with the second quarter of this century. 
Imaginative youths, born and educated in the new 
republic, discovered that they were poets, and strove 
to express the spirit of their birth and training. 
Among them, Pierpont, Dana, AUston, Sprague, Bry- 
ant, — the gentle stars of the East, — began to show 
their light, and offered their tender or patriotic lyrics, 
their meditative verse, their placid monographs on the 
phases of American scenery and tradition. Of these, 
Bryant was the one whose genius had the elements 
that give permanence to the work of poets. In the 
South, a few scattered minstrels, such as Wilde and 
Pinkney, sang. their Lovelace lyrics. Their type has 
survived, almost to our day. Throughout the swift 
development of the Northern States, the South — agri- 
cultural, feudal^ provincial — loyally clung to its eight-., 



Differenti' 

at ion. 



Earliest 
promise of 
a Hovte- 
School, 
1815- 

yohn Pier' 

pont : 
17S5-1S66. 

Richard 
Henry 
Da7ui : 
17S7-1879. 

Washing'- 
ton AU- 
ston: 1779- 
1S43. 

C/iarles 
Sprague : 
1791-1875. 

Bryant. 

Richard 
Henry 
M'ild: : 
1789-1847. 

Edward 
Co ate 
Pinhuy : 
1802-28. 



38 



GROWTH OF THE AMERICAN SCHOOL. 



The South. 



William 
Gilmore 
SiiHins : 
1806-70. 



Philip 
Pendleton 
Cooke : 
1816-50. 



Poe. 



yames 
A braham 
Hillhouse : 
1789-1841. 

John Gar- 
diner Cal- 
kins 

Braiiiard: 
1796-1828. 

y antes 
Gates 
Per civ al : 
1795-1856. 

A llo-w- 
ances to be 
tnade. 



eenth-century taste, making no intellectual changes 
so long as human slavery was the basis of its physical 
life. I shall hereafter refer to the quality of the new- 
born Southern imagination. That it exists, in fresh 
and hopeful promise, is now beyond doubt. A few of 
the earlier Southern writers — one of whom was SimmSp 
the novelist-poet — worked courageously, but with more 
will and fluency than native power ; so that, in spite 
of their abundant verse, such a lyrist as Pendleton 
Cooke was long the typical Southern poet, — a name 
joined with the memory of a single song. A collec- 
tion of the earlier Southern poetry worth keeping would 
be a brief anthology, which a little volume might con- 
tain, and in which more than one of Albert Pike's 
productions certainly should be found. Poe, whose 
pieces would occupy one third of it, sought the literary 
market, deserting Richmond and Baltimore for Phila- 
delphia and New York. He lived in the Northern 
atmosphere, and, like Bryant, took his part in the busy 
movement of its civic life and work. 

Besides the Eastern poets whom I have named, 
there were others who still more closely followed 
English models : among them, the orthodox bards of 
Connecticut, Hillhouse and Brainard, compared with 
whom Percival, the eccentric scholar and recluse, 
shines by virtue of a gift improved by no mean cul- 
ture. His lyrics and poems of nature, though infe- 
rior to Bryant's, so resemble them that he would be 
called the latter's pupil, had not the two composed 
in the same manner from the outset. 

These writers and some others of their time must, 
in all fairness, be judged by it. They had their mod- 
est laurels and rewards, and were the bright selected 
few of their country and period, — no less distin- 
guishedj though within a smaller horizon, than theit 



}L I LLECK. — DRA KE. 



39 



latter-day successors. Their work was the best of its 
kind which America could show ; it had the knack 
of making itself read in llic aninuils and school-books, 
and intiuenced the sentiment of more than one gen- 
eration. Were Dana and Allston flourishing now, 
they would accomplish feats then impracticable, and 
doubtless would be at no disadvantage among our 
present fa\'oriles, nor less receive our honor and sup- 
port. Fashion is a potency in art, making it hard to 
judge between the temporary and the lasting. Are 
we sure that our popular poets are better in native 
faculty ? If they have a finer understanding and a 
defter handling of their craft, these may be partly a 
consequence of the fact that not Montgomery and 
Wilson, but Keats, and Wordsworth, and Tennyson, 
and their greater masters, have supplied the models 
of a recent school. 

It was natural, also, that the literary centre should 
shift from place to place, along a sea-board whose 
capital was scarcely yet defined. New York early 
drew together a number of bright young wits and 
songsters. The fame of the prose-romancers, Cooper 
and Irving, and their success with home themes, were 
gratifying to the local and national pride, and en- 
couraged at the time, as far as literature was con- 
cerned, a broader American sentiment than prevailed 
in New England. That was a spirited little group of 
rhyming satirists whose fancy brightened the pages 
of Coleman's "Evening Post." Two young writers, 
Halleck and Drake, worked in comradeship until the 
one sustained a more than common misfortune in the 
other's untimely death. These two men were real 
poets ; such is the impression left as one reads, after 
many years, the verse composed by them. Had they 
been born half a century later, they now would work 



New York, 



Cooper and 
Irving. 



" The 

Croakers* 

1S19-25. 



40 



GROWTH OF THE AMERICAN SCHOOL. 



Pioneers. 



yohti 
Howard 
Payne : 
1791-1852. 



Joseph 
Rodman 
Drake : 
1 795- 1 820. 



Fitz- 
Gree7ie 

Halh'xk : 
1 790-1867. 



more elaborately, but with less certainty of reputa- 
tion. Their best pieces were at once so received 
into popular affection that the authors' names still 
last. Both of these poets had humor, and a percep- 
tion of its legitimate use. They, with Bryant and his 
school, — with Brockden Brown, Paulding, Cooper, Ir- 
ving, and Miss Sedgwick, writers of prose, and the 
dramatist Payne, author of " Brutus " and other by- 
gone plays, and of that abiding carol, " Home, Sweet 
Home," — were the first Americans whose work gave 
any substantial evidence of a native movement in 
ideal or creative literature. Drake died in his twenty- 
sixth year, leaving a daughter, through whom his 
poetic gift has been transmitted to our day. He had 
a quick, genuine faculty, and could be frolicsome or 
earnest at will. As an exercise of that delicate imag- 
ination which we term fancy, TAe Culprit Fay^ although 
the work of a youth schooled in fairy-lore and the 
metres of Coleridge, Scott, and Moore, boded well for 
his future. " The American Flag " is a stirring bit of 
eloquence in rhyme. The death of this spirited and 
promising writer was justly deplored. His talent was 
healthy ; had he lived, American authorship might not 
so readily have become, in Griswold's time, a vent for 
every kind of romantic and sentimental absurdity. 
Drake also would have stimulated the muse of Hal- 
leck, whose choicest pieces were composed before he 
had outlived the sense of that recent companionship. 
He, too, was a natural lyrist, whose pathos and elo- 
quence were inborn, and whose sentiment, though he 
wrote in the prevailing English mode, was that of his 
own land. As we read those favorites of our school- 
boy days, " Burns " and " Red Jacket " and " Marco 
Bozzaris," we feel that Halleck was, within his bounds, 
a national poet. Circumstances dulled his fire, and 



JNCRKA SED A CTI VITV. 



41 



he lived to write drivel in his old age. But the early 
lyrics remain, nor was there anything of their kind in 
our home-poetry to compete with them until long after 
their first production. 

'Hie impulse given to poetry and belles-lettres by 
the example of the early poeis and novelists increased 
with the appearance of fresh stri\ers after literary 
fame. In the East, names began to be mentioned 
that now are great indeed ; others, then more com- 
monly known, have passed almost out of memory. 
A few teachers of sound literary doctrine, like E. T. 
Channing, of Cambridge, were sowing good seed for 
future harvests. In New York, the writings of Willis 
and Tuckerman, of the song-makers Hoffman, Mor- 
ris, and English, of Verplanck, the Duyckincks, Benja- 
min, Griswold, and other editors and bookwrights, and 
the parade of new versifiers, male and female, betok- 
ened a taste, however crude and ill-regulated, for the 
pursuit of letters. Occasionally a note of promise was 
heard, from some quaint genius like Ralph Hoyt, or 
some aspirant like Lord, of whom great things w^ere 
predicted, and who, in spite of Poe's vindictive on- 
slaught, was and is a poet. A good deal of eloquent 
and high-sounding verse was produced by such writers 
as Ross Wallace and Albert Pike. In the East, John 
Neal, William Ware, Lunt, Hillard, Mrs. Child, — 
and in regions farther south, Conrad, Kennedy, and 
Simms, — were active at this time. There were others 
whose claim to attention will be frequent throughout 
this work. But to enumerate all who, in the second 
quarter of this century, held themselves of much ac- 
count is quite beyond my need and intention. Of 
the New York group, Willis perhaps had the most 
adroit and graceful talent, but it was not always exer- 
cised as by one possessing convictions. His kindness, 



Growing 

literary 

activity. 

Henry 
Thcodort 
Tuckcr- 
vian : 
1S13-71. 

CJiarles 
Fcfuto 
Hoffman : 
1S06-84. 

George 
Pope Afor- 
ris : 1S02- 
64. 

TJiouias 
Dunn 
Eiti^lish : 
1S.9- 

Park Bcti' 
jainin : 
1809-64. 

Ralph 
Hoyt : 
1810-78. 

Williajn 
Wilber- 
force 
Lord: 
1S19- 

IVilliain 
Ross Wal- 
lace : iSlQ' 
81. 

Albert 
Pike : 
1809- 

John 

Neal: 

1793-1S76. 

George 
Liait : 
1803-85. 

Robert 
Taylor 
Conrad : 
1S10-5S. 



42 



GROWTH OF THE AMERICAN SCHOOL. 



Nathaniel 
Parker 

U^'illis : 
1806-67. 



" The Lit- 
trail.'''' 



Pseztdo- 
d merican- 
istn. 



tact, and experience of the world made him an arbi- 
ter in a provincial time. They also seriously exposed 
him to the three worldly perils of which, no less than 
in the days of the Apostle John, the children of the 
Lord must have a care. A few of his lyrics are charm- 
ingly tender and delicate, but he never did himself 
full justice as a poet, nor realized the purpose of his 
ambitious boyhood. The bustle of the Literati, as Poe 
chose to call them, and the concentration of thriving 
journals and book-houses in Philadelphia and New 
York, — whither most roads then seemed to lead, — 
made for a while the scribbling class of this middle 
region very conspicuous and alert. Their kith and 
kin, scattered throughout the States, multiplied in 
numbers. The first green fruit of a school-system, 
under which boys and girls had models set before 
them, and were incited to test their own skill in com- 
position, fell in plenty from the tree. Each county 
had its prodigy contributing to the annuals and maga- 
zines. Lowell's " mass-meeting " of poets was in con- 
tinuous session, — made up of those who wrote verse, 
read and praised it one to another, and printed it for 
their countrymen to read and praise. The dull and 
authoritative felt the responsibilities of the situation. 
Never was a more united effort made, with malice pre- 
pense, to create an indigenous school. It was thought 
essential that purely American themes and incidents 
should be utilized. Cockney poets, emulating the 
method of Cooper, sent fancy ranging through the 
aboriginal forest, and wreaked their measures upon 
the supposititious Indian of that day. Powhatan and 
Tecumseh became the heroes of hot-pressed cantos, 
now extinct. The Spirit of Wakondah was invoked 
by one bard, and made to tower above the Rocky 
Mountains, more awe-inspiring than Camoens's Spirit 



PASTOR ET OVES. 



43 



of the Cape. Each poet, moreover, tried his hand at 
every form of work, and each thonglu it specially in- 
cumbent upon himself to write a drama, — not solely 
for the stage, but that America might not be deficient 
in the most complex order of poetical composition. 
Since the heyday of the Delia Cruscans never were 
so many neophytes and amateurs suffered to bring 
their work before the public. Women took part in 
the campaign, and, truth to say, were often more 
spontaneous and natural than their brother-writers. 
One of the sex, Mrs. Sigourney, long had been sup- 
plying the prose and verse that answered to the sim- 
ple w^ants of a primitive constituency. Another, 
" Maria del Occidente," gained something like fame, 
and even beyond the seas. She was, in fact, a woman 
of ardent feeling, instinctive art, and undoubted met- 
rical talent, though scarcely meriting the praise which 
Lamb and Southey awarded her, or the extravagant 
eulogium of her modern editor. There was no lack of 
rivals to her success among the American pupils of 
Mrs. Hemans and Miss Landon. Such caterers to 
the literary market w^ere found not only upon this side 
of the Atlantic. England w^as slowly escaping from 
her own sentimentalists ; the " Annuals " and " Souve- 
nirs " were still in vogue, and the fashions of the two 
countries were less divided than now. Poe, with a 
critical eye made somewhat keen by practice, saw the 
ludicrous side of all this, and poured out vials of 
wrath upon his contemporaries, though with no just 
claim to impartiality. Lowell, from a classical dis- 
tance, celebrated their follies in the lines beginning, 

" But stay, here comes Tityrus Griswold, and leads on 
The flocks whom he first plucks alive, and then feeds on!" 

But this reminds us that Poe, Lowell, Longfellow, 



Lydia 
Hcnuard 
Huntley 
Sigour- 
ney : 1791- 
1S65. 

I\faria 
Gmven 
Brooks : 
1795-1845. 

T/t£ Senti' 
nietUalists. 



Curative 
applica- 
tions. 



44 



GROWTH OF THE AMERICAN SCHOOL. 



Survival 
of the fit- 
test. 



Expert- 
vtental 
failures 
needful to 
uttimaie 



Genuine 
quality 
of the more 
recent 
school. 



and Emerson were gaining influence at that very time ; 
that others since eminent in our literature were gradu- 
ally distinguished from the multitude ; that, however 
absurd and depressing the condition just set forth^ a 
superficial literary movement may be better than no 
movement at all. As the voyage progressed, it really 
was surprising how soon the dullards and pretenders 
went below, while the born sailors helped the vessel 
forward. The fit survivors of a brood of poets and 
authors soon obtained a grateful hearing, and a few 
publishers found pleasure and profit in nursing the 
works of these home-writers. A number of poets — 
men of individual traits, but allied in sentiment and 
taste, and belonging to the same generation — seemed 
to arise at once, and gained the position which they 
have steadfastly held to the present day. 

II. 

All this preliminary ferment, then, was in some 
way needful. The experiments of many who thought 
themselves called enabled the few who were chosen 
to find motives and occasions for work of real import. 
The first year of the new dispensation was worth more 
in its product than the score of years preceding it. 
The poets who now came to the front have gained 
distinction justly, vying with those of other coun- 
tries in finish and thought, and in that reflection of 
the life about them which alone could make them 
the leaders of a national school. At the recent date 
when the formation of such a school became manifest, 
these poets spoke truthfully for our people as they 
were and had been. One who gives their verse the 
fair consideration which he would extend to that of 
any foreign land or language is led to this conclusioa 



POETRY OF NATURE. 



45 



The new poetry was not autochthonous in the sense of 
differing from all previous outgrowth of the universal 
human heart, and as at variance with forms that have 
long seemed natural to our mother-tongue, but rather 
in unaffected presentation of the feeling and ideas of 
its constituency, and after this wise was as national, 
fresh, and aspiring as America herself. If this land 
has not yet grown to full voice, it has not lacked a 
characteristic expression in the verse of our favorite 
poets. Their careers, we have seen, began almost si- 
multaneously at the close of the second fifth of this 
centur}^, and have been prolonged until now, through 
a period of nearly fifty years. Let me again briefly 
refer to the elements which our literature hitherto 
might justly be called upon to idealize, and make 
some mention of the leading poets whose song has 
been the response to such a call. 

III. 

I HAVE said that a fellowship with the spirit of 
natural Landscape, and the recognition of its beauty 
and majesty, were the earliest, as they are the most 
constant, traits of American verse. The contemplation 
of nature has not often been the first step, or the 
second, in the progress of ideality. But this remark 
applies to primitive races. The aborigines of a coun- 
try are almost a part of its mould, — or, at least, so 
closely related to its dumb fauna that they reflect but 
little on the mountains, woods, and waters which ap- 
pear to surround them as a matter of course. Heroic 
or savage deeds of prowess are their first incitements 
to poetic utterance. Even an extended period of cul- 
ture and growth has not always led them to consider 
the landscape objectively. Of this the Greeks, with 



Traits of 
A >nericau 
verse. 



\. Truth- 
/ul re/lec- 
tion of Na- 
ture. 



46 



GROWTH OF THE AMERICAN SCHOOL. 



The usual 
order re- 
versed. 



Our first 
distinctive 
group of 
painters. 



their curious disregard of natural scenery, are a fa- 
miliar example. They observed nature only to inform 
it with their own life, until there was no river or tree 
without its genius. First, epic action ; next, patriotism 
and devotion ; afterward, dramatic passion ; last of all, 
analysis and reflective art. In our own settlements, 
a race that already had gone through these stages 
took possession of a new world. A struggle with its 
conditions involved a century of hardship and dis- 
trust. The final triumph, the adjustment of the people 
to their locality, brought a new understanding, out of 
which came the first original quality in our poetry and 
design. Here it is to be remembered that descriptive 
literature, poetry or prose, though not earlier upon 
the record of intellectual development, is lower as re- 
spects the essential worth of Art than that which is 
emotional or dramatic. In the full prime of creative 
work, the one must serve as a background for the 
other, upon which attention chiefly is concentrated. 
All in all, it was a foregone conclusion that our first 
independent artists should betake themselves to the 
study and utilization of American scenery. In paint- 
ing, our first distinctive school — for such I do not 
term the early group of historical and portrait painters, 
from West to Allston — has been that of the land- 
scapists. Let us own that when either poetry or 
painting deals with nature in no copyist's fashion, but 
with a sense of something " deeply interfused," it may 
reach the higher plane of art-expression. To this end 
our modern painters, upon the whole, have striven, 
from the time of Cole. The hands of Durand, In- 
ness, Kensett, the two Giffords, Whittredge, McEntee, 
Church, Bierstadt, Brown, Martin, Wyant, have given 
us a landscape-school that, for sincerity and freshness, 
is notable on either continent, and is constantly gain* 



BRYANT AM) J//S SO'CCESSOJJS. 



47 



ini; in tcchnic[ue and variety from the experiments of 
younger men. Tiie literary counterpart of this school 
began with Bryant, the Druid of our forests, the high- 
priest of Nature in her elemental types. These he 
has celebrated with the coolness and breadth that 
were traits of the earlier painters named, though lack- 
ing the freedom and detail of their successors. It is 
dangerous to measure one art by another, or to con- 
fuse their terms ; yet we feel that the relationship 
between the pictures of Durand and Kensett, for ex- 
ample, and the meditative verse of Bryant — from 
" Thanatopsis " and " A Forest Hymn " to " The 
Night Journey of a River" — is near and suggestive. 
Bryant was at the head of our reflective poets, find- 
ing his bent at the outset, and holding it to the very 
close. His work rose to an imaginative height wliich 
descriptive poetry of itself rarely attains. 

He was followed — at an obvious distance — by 
Percival, Wilcox, Street, and other mild celebrants of 
nature, who failed of his breadth and elevation. Their 
patient measures show how strongly the scener}" of 
America has impressed her people. To the present 
day, the landscape, however incidental to the poetry 
of Emerson, Whittier, Thoreau, Lowell, and Taylor, is 
constantly there, and fresh as a rocky pasture-ground 
in New England or Pennsylvania compared with a 
storied park of Warwickshire. In the work of Mrs. 
Thaxter, Piatt, and other recent idyllists, it is natural, 
sympathetic, — in short, thoroughly American. And 
for me the value of the poetry of Whitman and Joa- 
quin ^Miller does not belong to the method and dem- 
ocratic vistas of the one, and the melodramatic ro- 
mance of the other ; but to Whitman's fresh, absolute 
handling of outdoor nature, and to the fine surprises 
which Miller gives us in haunting pictures of the 
plains, the sierra, and the sundown seas. 



Their coitu 
peers in 
Song. 



Bryant. 



Carlos 
Wilcox : 
1794-1827. 

Alfred 
Billings 
Street : 
iSn-8i. 



Fresh and 
original 
treatment 
0/ land- 
scape. 



GROWTH OF THE AMERICAN SCHOOL. 



2. Presen- 
tation of 
the nation- 
al senti- 
meni. 



Our poets 
true to 

their oitm 
time and 
kind. 

Bryant, 



Wkittier. 



Pro arts et 
focis. 



Our poetry has been equally fortunate as the lan- 
guage of the ideas and human emotions to which, as 
a people, we most readily incline. Notwithstanding 
the change and unrest of a new country, the milieu 
which Taine found in England here exists, and with 
fewer qualifications. Not that America is all middle 
class, as some have asserted. But her ideal is de- 
rived from sentiments which, even more than in Great 
Britain, preserve a Saxon quality, ■ — those of domes- 
ticity, piety, freedom, loyalty to the institutions of the 
land. If unessential to various dramatic and impas- 
sioned art-creations, they have an art and passion of 
their own, and, in recognizing this, our singers are 
more national than their English contemporaries. The 
latter, except through the odes and idyls of Tennyson, 
have conveyed to us little of the home-sentiment, the 
English faith and feeling, which brought the mother- 
land to greatness. Doubtless it is because these qual- 
ities were so general in the song of their predecessors 
that the Victorian choir has earnestly concerned itself 
with mediaeval and legendary work, and with those 
technical diversions which are counted as art for art's 
sake. 

The instinct of our poets has led them first to 
charge their lyrics with the feeling of their time and 
people, and in doing this they have, almost without 
exception, given voice to their own heart. Bryant's 
verse is an illustration. It everywhere breathes of 
liberty and patriotism. But as an apostle of all the 
sentiments just named, - — taken singly or in combina- 
tion, — Whittier, the Quaker bard of Amesbury, whose 
art is by turns* so homely and so refined, certainly is 
preeminent, and in a sense has made himself that 
uncrowned laureate, the people's poet. His legend 
is pro arts et focis. He glows with faith, strong by 



NATIVE SENTIMENT AND EMOTION. 



49 



heredity in New Eng-hmd, and thence outllowing to the 
West, nor forgets the beauty and duty of temperance, 
charity, and virtue. Nothing restrains his democratic 
conception of the freedom of the soil, the nobiUty of 
work, the right to labor for one's self. Pie represents \ 
(to borrow Hugo's formula) our conflict with oppres- 
sion, and was tlie herald and inspired seer of the 
enduring fiery conflict that preceded the antislavery 
war. His earnestness and burning effort contrast 
with Bryant's stern repose. In various national qual- 
ities the more polished work of Longfellow and Low- 
ell has rivaled Whittier's, and sustained it. They, in 
their ways, and Gallagher, Holland, Trowbridge, and 
Taylor, each in his own, have paid tribute to the 
charm of American home-life, and have repeated the 
ancestral and prevalent feeling of regions which they 
thoroughly comprehend. In this direction they have 
been accompanied by many writers in verse or prose, 
— simple balladists like the Vermonter, Eastman, and 
tale-writers with the insiiiht and fidelity that belons: 
to Sylvester Judd, Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, and 
Rose Terry Cooke. In times of concentrated emo- 
tion, our poets of all degrees have broken out in 
vivid strains. Mrs. Howe's "Battle Hymn " is mem- 
orable. There is native fire in the lyrics of McMas- 
ter, Melville, O'Hara, Finch, Palmer, Randall, For- 
ceythe Willson, and that brave, free singer, Brownell, 
to whom Ticknor, sounding the war-cry of the South, 
bore a half-likeness in manner and spirit. There have 
been many single voices, heard but for a moment, of 
this class. Nor should we quite forget the humbler 
song-makers for the people, such as Foster, the negro 
melodist, — and Work, to whose stirring music our 
soldiers marched with a will, and of whose songs two 
or three at least should preserve the name of their 
4 



Conjlict 
with op- 
pression. 

William 
Davis Gal 
lagher : 
i8o8- 

Josiah 
Gilbert 
Holland: 
1S19-81. 

John 
Toiutisend 
Tro7u- 
d ridge : 
1S27- 

Charles 
Ga7nage 
Eastman ." 
i8i6-6i. 

Julia 
Ward 
Ho7ve : 
1819- 

Hermati 
Melville : 
1819- 

Byron 
Forceythe 
Willson : 
1837-67. 

He7try 
Harvard 
Browftell 
1820-72 

Francis 
Orrery 
Ticknor : 
1822-74. 

(See In- 
dex.) 



50 



GROWTH OF THE AMERICAN SCHOOL. 



Religious 
Verse. 

A rthur 
Cleveland 
Coxe : 
1818- 

{See In- 
dex.) 



A tnerican 

female 

poets. 



The early 
and later 
sisterhoods 
of song. 
(See hc'- 
dex.) 



University 
^roup. 



composer. In closing this section I will add a word 
in regard to a kin.d of verse which, of all, is the most 
common and indispensable, — that devoted to rever- 
ence and worship. The religious verse of America, 
whether the work of poets at large, or of those whose 
range is chiefly confined to it, — Muhlenberg, Coxe, 
Doane, Peabody, Croswell, Sears, S. Johnson, S. Long- 
fellow, Abraham Coles, Ray Palmer, Harriet Kimball, 
Hedge, Dr. Frothingham, Randolph, Chadwick, Sav- 
age, and many other orthodox or liberal composers, — 
ranks in quality, if not in quantity, with the hym- 
nology of other lands. 

No one can enter upon the most cursory review of 
our literature without being struck by the share which 
women have had in its production. A sisterhood of 
song, expressing its own delicate and heroic nature, 
and many thoughts and affections that are sweet and 
high and impassioned, has won in America a just and 
distinctive regard. The female voices early added 
softness, and at times strength, to the general song. 
The names of Maria Lowell, Mrs. Osgood, Mrs. Whit- 
man, the Cary sisters, Mrs. Judson, Mrs. Sewall, Eliz- 
abeth Lloyd Howell, Mrs. Oakes Smith, Mrs. E. C. 
Kinney, and Mrs. Botta, some of whom have passed 
away, are cherished by not a few. They have had 
successors — of whom are Mrs. Cooke, Mrs. Stoddard, 
Mrs. Allen, Mrs. Whitney, Mrs. Dorr, Mrs. Greenough, 
Lucy Larcom, Mrs. Hudson, and others to whom I 
shall refer in a later chapter — some of whose names 
are veritably household words throughout the country, 
and much of whose work, in verse and prose, has 
taken a subtler range, a better finish, a definite and 
influential hold upon the public attention. 

American culture, if not so exact and diligent as 
that of more learned nations, is sympathetic, and ex- 



CAMBRIDGE. — CONCORD. 



5' 



plores all literatures for its delight and betterment. 
It is most advanced in the sections where it took its 
start, but there and elsewhere is well represented in 
our poetry. A university school has sent out rays 
from Cambridge, the focus being the home of a poet 
with whose rise the new poetic movement fairly began. 
He grew to be not the poet of a section, nor even of 
a people, but one rendered into many languages, and 
known throughout the world. Longfellow, on the 
score of his fame, and his almost exclusive devotion 
to the muse, became the centre of a group distin- 
guished by culture, elegant learning, regard for the 
manner of saying no less than for what is said. His 
early legend rightly was Outre Mcr, for he stimulated 
our taste by choice presentation of what is rare abroad, 
until it grew able to perceive what is rare and choice 
at home. \^ath thoughts of this singer come thoughts 
of peace, of romance, of the house made beautiful by 
loving hands. Lowell and Holmes, no less than 
Longfellow, and wonted to the same atmosphere, rep- 
resent our conflict with rudeness, ignorance, and ascet- 
icism. They laugh the Philistine to scorn, and with 
their wit and learning advance the movement toward 
sweetness and light. Near them are others, such as 
Parsons, Stor}', Robert Lowell, Mrs. Fields, who may 
be classed more readily with a composite group of 
whom I have yet to speak. But first let us observe 
that an imaginative and unique division of the recent 
school is that which represents the liberal philosophy 
of New England and its conflict with ancestral super- 
stition. The mind and soul of Transcendentalism 
seemed to find their predestined service in the land 
of the Puritans. The poetry which sprang from it 
had a more subtle aroma than that whose didacticism 
infected the English Lake school. The latter made 



Long/el' 
low- 



''Outre 
Mcry 



Conflict 
with ascet 



Robert 
Traill 
Spence 
Loiuell 
iSi6- 

Tratiscen- 

dejital 

group. 



Conco>'d 
and Gras 
mere. 



52 



GROWTH OF THE AMERICAN SCHOOL. 



A ndrews 
Norton : 
1786-1853. 

Emerson. 

Amos 
Bronson 

A Icott : 
1799- 

He7iry 
David 
Thoreau : 
1817-62. 

Sarah 
Margaret 
Fuller 
Ossoli : 
1810-50. 

JoTtes 
Very : 
1813-80. 

Christo- 
pher 
Pearse 
Cranch : 
1813- 

William. 
Ellery 
Channing: 
i8i8- 

David At- 
ivood Was- 
son : 1823- 

T ho mas 
Went- 
•worth 
Higgin- 
son : 1823- 

Franklin 
Benjamin 
Sanborn : 
1831- 

Erastus 
VVolcott 
Ellsworth: 
1822- 

William. 
Bull 
Wright : 
1838-80. 



prosaic the verse of famous poets ; out of the formal 
the quickest inspiration of our down-East thinkers 
seemed to grow. Their philosophy, beginning with 
the prose and verse of Andrews Norton, and the ex- 
alted spirituality of Dr. Channing, and soon going 
beyond the early liberties, has attained its riper ex- 
pression in lyrical work, prophetic, mystical, or quaintly 
wise. It borrowed, in truth, the wisdom of the Orient 
and the speculations of Germany, but has not failed 
to apply the vision that so inspired it to the life and 
action of the New World. The white light of Emer- 
son, the pure and elevated master of the Concord 
group, has been a steadfast beacon for his companions. 
Among these, Alcott, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Jones 
Very, Cranch, Ellery Channing, Wasson, Higginson, 
and Sanborn may be reckoned, with due allowance for 
the individuality of each. Here and there stray sing- 
ers, like the shy and philosophic minstrel, Ellsworth, 
have seemed to belong to this peculiarly American 
caste. Another such was the lamented Dr. Wright, 
whose gift was delicately pure and thoughtful. Poe 
was right in claiming that the speculative tendency 
of these poets was at odds with the artistic effect of 
their work, but ought to have seen that a more ex- 
quisite feeling and insight, allied with that tendency, 
often made amends for it. 

Meantime, as I was about to point out, we have 
had a number of poets, including most of those who 
do not live in New England, who have clung to their 
art from sheer love of the beautiful, under varying 
chances of favor and discouragement. They have paid 
slight regard to their respective localities, writing after 
their own versatile moods, and looking wherever they 
pleased for models and themes. Some have followed 
other than literary pursuits, or, if earning their bread 



NEW VOKK AND HER POETS. 



53 



by the pen, have accei^tted the vicissitudes of their craft 
under the conditions heretofore mentioned. Their 
tastes and habits have made them composite, if not 
cosmopolitan. Their work is not provincial, though 
often less original than that of some whom we have 
named. But in escaping the rigors of a chosen sec- 
tion, they have also foregone its distinctions. The 
East has loved its poets, and, what is more, has lis- 
tened to them. The New England spirit has been that 
of Attica, w^hich state, we are told, " secure in her 
sterility, boasted that her land had never been inun- 
dated by these tides of immigration," and that "she 
traced the stream of her population in a backward 
course through many generations." With respect to 
philosophy and economics, and in fields of taste and 
literary judgment, the trust of the modern Athens is 
founded on her own usage and her men of note. It 
is true that the reverence paid our elder poets is now 
general throughout the land, and as sincere and beau- 
tiful as that which the bards of Germany and Scan- 
dinavia always have received at the hands of their 
countrymen. It even has its jealous side, and renders 
it hard for new aspirants to gain their share of wel- 
come. But New York has been to her later poets, 
somewhat as Oxford Street was to De Quincey, a stony- 
hearted mother. This is partly due to the standards 
of success established by monetary power and prosper- 
ity, and partly to the accident that here, more than in 
the East, idealists have had to live by all sorts of very 
practical work. Writers have been tolerated and even 
welcomed, but not honored and taken as counsellors 
until they have proved themselves worldly wise, or 
gained their influence elsewhere. Then New York 
has been proud of them, in her awkward w^ay, and 
used them at need, but has assigned to the provinces 



An inde- 
pendent 
ciass. 



Eastern 
regard fot 
letters and 



IFords- 
IV or til s 
" Greece-P 
p. 72. 



Metropoli'^ 
tan ifidif- 
ference. 



54 



GROWTH OF THE AMERICAN SCHOOL. 



the duty of reading their works. Bryant came to be 
her most honored citizen, and for some years was a 
kind of Uterary Doge ; his city knew that he was a 
poet, for the country had told her so. It would be 
interesting to learn how large a proportion of the 
wealthy classes among whom he was a peer, and who 
placed him at the head of feasts and civic gather- 
ings, knew this through an appreciative knowledge 
of his poetry. Such, however, is apt to be the state 
of things in a great commercial centre, — so great 
that it matures slowly, and must long await that 
splendid prime of which smaller towns earlier furnish 
types in miniature ; and under just such conditions 
many a poet has struggled, yet gone down to time 
and fame. 

The artistic bent of Parsons and Story, of Poe, 
Taylor, Stoddard, and Aldrich, in New York; of the 
Philadelphians, Boker and Read ; of the Southerners, 
Thompson, Timrod, Hayne, Lanier, and Esten Cooke; 
and of various younger writers who justify future no- 
tice, has been plainly seen in the application of each 
man's gift, whatever its degree. They have cared for 
poetry alone, and have believed its country to be uni- 
versal, and that England, whose poets conspicuously 
avail themselves of the materials and atmosphere of 
other lands, should be the last to lay down a law of 
restriction. Herein, nevertheless, they subject their 
work, upon its general merits, to comparison with 
models which they scarce could hope to surpass ; for 
only the highest excellence could draw attention to 
them as poets of America. Some of our verse com- 
posed in this wise has been so charming, and withal 
so original, as to make reputations. Poe's lyrics are 
an example, and others besides Poe, less conspicuous 
as victims of unrest and heroes of strange cafeers> 



Poets of 
the artistic 
and cosMto- 
■politan 
type. 

{See Chap. 
JCII., and 
Index. ) 



PAJHSOA'S. — yO/CrU.X. —STOKV 



55 



also have represciiled the conllict with materialism, 
and have shown as genuine a gift and a wider range. 
Dr. Parsons holds a place of his own. He is one of 
those rare poets whose infrequent work is so beauti- 
ful as to make us wish for more. In cfuality, at least, 
it is of a kind witli Landor's ; his touch is sure, and 
has at command the choicer modes of lyrical art, — 
those which, although fashion may overslaugh them, 
return again, and enable a true poet to be quite as 
original as when hunting devices previously unessayed. 
His independence, on the other hand, is exhibited in 
his free renderings of Dante. These, with Eliot Nor- 
ton's exquisite translation of the "Vita Nuova," and 
Longfellow^'s of the entire " Commedia," with Bry- 
ant's of the " Iliad " and " Odyssey," Brooks's of vari- 
ous German authors, Taylor's of " Faust," and with 
the kindred achievements of Munford, Cranch, Le- 
land, Macdonough, Alger, Long, Dufheld, Wilstach, 
Coles, Rowland, Miss Preston, Miss Frothingham, and 
Emma Lazarus (whose poetic version of Heine re- 
cently appeared), have made the American school of 
translation somewhat eminent. Parsons' briefer po- 
ems often are models, but occasionally show a trace 
of that stiffness w^hich too little employment gives 
even the hand of daintier sense. "Lines on a Bust 
of Dante," in structure, diction, loftiness of thought, 
is the peer of any modern lyric in our tongue. Inver- 
sion, the vice of stilted poets, becomes with him an 
excellence, and old forms and accents are rehandled 
and charged with life anew% It is to be regretted 
that Dr. Parsons has not used his gift more freely. 
He has been a poet for poets, rather than for the 
people ; but many types are required to fill out the 
hemicycle of a nation's literature. Story's various 
talents and acquirements as a scholar, painter, sculp- 



T/tovtns 
William 
Parsons : 
1819- 



Tratisla- 
tions. 

Charles 
Eliot i\'or- 
io7i : 1.S27- 

Charles 
Ti))iothy 
Brooks : 
1S13-83. 

{See In- 
dex.) 



Pnrso7is a 
viaster of 
lyric verse. 



WilUant 
II 'etmore 
Story : 
1819-- 



56 



GROWTH OF THE AMERICAN SCHOOL. 



Taylor, 



Conflicts 
•with di- 
dacticistn 
and tradi- 
tion, 

Thomas 
Buchanan 
Read : 
1822-72. 



George 
Henry 
Boker : 
1823- 



tor, author, and what not, and his prolonged resi- 
dence and studies abroad, are mirrored in his verse. 
This, indeed, is so un-American that I was held to 
blame by a prominent London journal for not review- 
ing him as a British-born and Victorian poet. He 
has extreme refinement, but is a close follower of 
Browning's lyrico-dramatic method, and more novel in 
his choice of themes than in their treatment. " Cleo- 
patra " and " Praxiteles and Phryne " are striking 
pieces, and show him at his best. Among the group 
under notice was the ardent and generous Taylor, 
whose seniority in death has caused my selection of 
him as one of those who illustrate the rise of the 
American school, and upon whom alone I venture any 
extended criticism. Poe, the eldest of the art-group, 
and the subject of a future chapter, is related to the 
others as a toiling professional writer, whose ideality 
maintained itself apart from the atmosphere about 
him. In many respects he is an exception to the 
rest, but, on the whole, may be counted the first to 
revolt against didacticism, from the artist's point of 
viewj while Whitman, on the other hand, is hostile 
to art-tradition and conventionalism, as an apostle of 
the democracy of the future. Another artist-poet was 
Buchanan Read, whose song was of a more genuine 
quality than the painting which he made his vocation. 
His idyllic verse fairly portrayed the rural life of his 
own State, but his successes were a few rhymed lyr- 
ics and idyls that will be preserved. " The Closing 
Scene " gained a reputation through its descriptive 
beauty and clever treatment of a standard form of 
verse. His townsman, Boker, is the eldest of a little 
group to be described in a chapter on Bayard Tay- 
lor. A close study of the English poets, especially 
of the Elizabethan brotherhood, led him to dramatic 



READ. — BOKER. — STODDARD. 



57 



composition. Although his plays follow old models, 
and are founded upcMi the historic themes of foreign 
lands, they have sterling dramatic and poetic quali- 
ties. Thirty-five years ago, in an essay upon the con- 
dition and prospect of our literature, Dr. Griswold 
said that " the success of the plays of Bird and Con- 
rad, and the failure of those of Longfellow and Wil- 
lis," showed that there was still "patriotism enough 
among us to prefer works with the American inspira- 
tion to those of any degree of artistic merit without 
it." But it is recorded to the credit of some of Bo- 
ker's plays, which are of a poetic and literary mould, 
and bear the test of reading, that, like their humbler 
prototypes, — the acting plays of Bird, Conrad, Sar- 
gent, Mathews, and others, — they were found to have 
the life and substance that could gain them favor, 
not only in the closet, but on the stage. Some of 
them are antecedent to the realistic manner of our 
own time ; others have won renewed success in the 
present day, and proved themselves to be of a type 
superior to the chance and change of fashion. They 
show, one and all, a manly hand, and the healthy im- 
agination of the poet, their author. His minor pieces 
are of uneven quality, some of them thoroughly na- 
tional and spirited. Such lyrics as "On Board the 
Cumberland," " A Ballad of Sir John Franklin," and 
the " Dirge for a Soldier," often continue a poet's 
name more surely than the efforts which in truth are 
his masterpieces. 

Stoddard, the life-long friend and brother in song 
of Taylor and Boker, is still in full voice. A New 
Englander born, the honors of his life and service 
belong to New York. The whole range of his poetr}' 
has the unrestricted or cosmopolitan tendency of which 
I speak. He had poor advantages in youth, but an 



Introduc- 
tion to 
" The 
Prose 
Writers o/ 
America.''' 
By R. //'. 
Griswoid, 
1847. 



Epes Sar- 
gent : 
1813-80. 

Carueiirts 
Mathews ; 
1817- 



Boker's 
lyrics. 



Richard 
Henry 
Stoddard 
1825- 



GROWTH OF THE AMERICAN SCHOOL, 



A n imag- 
inative 



His blajik- 
verse, lyr- 
ics, etc. 



absolute bent for letters, and a passion for the beau- 
tiful resembling that of Poe. His knowledge of Eng- 
lish literature, old and new, early became so valuable 
that his younger associates, drawn to him by admira- 
tion of his poetry, never failed to profit by his learn- 
ing and suggestions. His life has been peculiarly 
that of a writer, with its changes and pleasurable 
pains, and is marked by independence, sensitiveness, 
devotion to his calling, and pride in the city with 
whose literary growth and labor he is identified. The 
characteristics of Stoddard's verse are affluence, sin- 
cere feeling, strength, a manner unmistakably his own, 
very delicate fancy, and, above all, an imagination at 
times exceeded by that of no other American poet. 
This last quality pervades his ambitious pieces, and 
at times breaks out suddenly in the minor verse 
through which he is best known. The exigencies of 
his profession have too constantly drawn upon his re- 
sources ; the bulk of his miscellaneous verse is large, 
and to this is somewhat due its unevenness. No 
poet is more unequal; few have more plainly failed 
now and then. On the other hand, few have reached 
a higher tone, and a selection could be made from 
his poems upon which to base a lasting reputation. 
"The Fisher and Charon," "The Dead Master," and 
the " Hymn to the Sea," are noble pieces of English 
blank verse, the secret of whose measure is given 
only to the elect ; one is impressed by the art, the 
thought, the imagination, which sustain these poems, 
and the Shakespeare and Lincoln odes. Stoddard's 
abundant songs and lyrics are always on the wing 
and known at first sight, — a skylark brood whose 
notes are rich with feeling. The sweet and direct 
method of The King^s Bell placed him high in the 
ranks of writers of narrative verse. Among poets 



SAXJj:. — LELAND. — BUTLER. 



59 



equal to him in years, he is, perhaps, the foremost of 
the artistic or cosmopolitan group. 

If I cared to give, in detail, various by-road illus- 
trations of the American spirit, I could cite many in- 
stances where the brooding humor, the quaintness 
and frankness, the pluck and fun and carelessness, of 
our new people long since cropped out in rhyme. 
These characteristics give life to the wise and witty 
purpose of Holmes's and Lowell's satires, and to the 
verses of Saxe, Leland, Fields, and Butler. We have 
their continuance and diversity in the clever, off-hand 
fantasies of younger men. There is no lack of dia- 
lect, bric-a-brac, and society verse. Some of our young 
Bohemians all at play, twenty years ago, — of whom 
George Arnold was American by birth, as were Hal- 
pine and O'Brien by adoption, — while not without 
their earnest moods, did rollicking work of this kind, 
and in Arnold's case it seemed to his friends but an 
offshoot of the better work he had it in him to do. 
The Dean among our writers of poems for occasions 
is unquestionably Dr. Holmes, by virtue of his apt 
response to the instant call, and of the wit, wisdom, 
conviction, and the scholarly polish that relegate his 
lightest productions to the select domain of art. 

To Whitman a chapter will be given, and is needed 
for the fair consideration of his traits and attitude. 
He represents, first of all, his own personality ; sec- 
ondly, the conflict with aristocracy and formalism. 
Against the latter he early took the position of an 
iconoclast, avowing that the time had come in which 
to create an American art by rejection of all forms, 
irrespective of their natural basis, which had come to 
us from the past. In their stead he proffered a form 
of his own. If I rightly understand the meaning of 
one or two recent papers by Mr. Whitman, his ex- 



American 
satire and 
Jeux- 
d' Esprit. 

John God- 
frey Saxe : 
1816-87. 

Charles 
Godfrey 
Leland : 
1S24- 

faines 
Thomas 
Fields : 
1816-81. 

William 
Allen 
Butler: 
1825- 

{See Chap, 
XII.) 



Holmes. 



Wkitmaiu 



6o 



GROWTH OF THE AMERICAN SCHOOL. 



A genuine 
home- 
school, thus 
liuiving 
txisted, 
should be 
vahied at 
its worth. 



See " N'o, 
Am. Re- 
view " .' 
ya?t. 1881, 



The first 

{.ourse 

•(.jided. 



treme views, in deprecation of what is and anticipa- 
tion of what is to be, are now somewhat tempered 
by years and experience. He is a man of striking 
physical and mental qualities, and excels most writers 
in personal influence, tact, and adroitness as a man 
of the world. He is an avowed champion of democ- 
racy, and accepted as such by the refined classes at 
home and abroad. I shall refer to his minute knowl- 
edge and healthy treatment of the American land- 
scape, of the phases and products of outdoor Nature, 
for in this respect his most fragmentary pieces show 
the handicraft of an artist and poet. 

We need not continue farther the analysis suggested 
in the previous chapter. I have not tried to make a 
rigid classification of all who have borne a part in 
the rise of a home-school, but to observe the general 
groups of Vi^hich some of our elder poets may be 
called the leaders, and the condition and sentiment 
by which their work has been affected. Enough has 
been said, I think, to justify the assertion that such 
a school already has had a career which Americans 
should be swift to recognize and slow to undervalue. 
One " of your own poets " has taken a different view, 
declaring that a barren void exists,— that our poetry 
has been marked by an absence of patriotism, and 
that it has shown brain and no soul. A more incor- 
rect or wilfully pessimistic statement never was made. 
In every department of art, times of energy are di- 
vided by times of calm. The first course is run, and 
there is a temporary halt, so far as poetry is con- 
cerned. The imaginative element in our literature is 
active as ever, but in other directions. Meantime, 
we have singers in their prime, resting their voices 
for the moment, and others whose fresh notes will 
soon be more definitely heard. Both these classes 



THE WRITER'S PROVINCE. 



will come within our review. The younger poets, 
upon whom the future depends, must prove them- 
selves well endowed, if they are to succeed to the 
laurels of those who, blessed with years and honors, 
have held the afTection of life-long readers scattered 
far and wide. It is of those elders only, the repre- 
sentative founders of our school, that I have under- 
taken to write at any length. To pass critical judg- 
ments upon those of my own, or a younger, genera- 
tion is bej'ond my province. The time will come 
when some of them will in turn occupy the high 
places, and furnish t}pical illustrations of poetry and 
the poetic life. In that near future there will not be 
wanting critics to measure their works, nor hands to 
award the recompense that is due to them who add 
to the sum of human pleasure by their ministry of 
sons. 



i^See Cltap- 
ter Xri.) 



6o 



HAPTER III. 



WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 



Impressive 
feeling 
excited by 
the poefs 
death. 



Born in 
Cwnming- 
ton-i Mass., 
Nov. 3, 
1794. 



I. 

WHEN Bryant died, in the flowery season that 
had inspired his sweetest lyric, the general 
pause and hush were singularly impressive. To the 
death of no other American, for a long time before 
and after, could be applied so aptly that Indian met- 
aphor of the sound of the fall of a great oak in the 
forest. The feeling was not one of unexpectedness, 
although his old age was free from decrepitude, — as 
if some deity kinder than Aurora had given him im- 
mortality without decay ; not one of sorrow, for he 
lived beyond the usual limit of life ; not that which 
we have when some man of office, rank, entanglement 
in great affairs, suddenly passes away. Yet the sta- 
tion of "the father of American song" was unique, 
and his loss was something strange and positive. He 
stood alone, — in certain respects, an incomparable 
figure. He had become not only a representative cit- 
izen, journalist, poet, but the serene, transfigured ideal 
of a good and venerable man. 

As a writer he had been before the public from a 
date near the beginning of the century, and so 
changeless through all its changes that his critics, in 
estimating the poet just dead, really were judging the 
poet of fifty years before, instead of guessing at the 



THE MAN AND THE POET. 



63 



verdict of time upon his productions. Howsoever 
they might differ as to the measure of liiyant's gift, 
and of Bryant the man, one thing was sure : no minor 
personage could gain, and retain to the last, such a 
hold upon popular interest, honor, deferential esteem. 
Others, before reaching his years, have had their rise 
and decline, outlasting themselvest, and finding occa- 
sion to declare with Cato Major, "It is a hard thing, 
Romans, to render an account before the men of a 
period different from that in which one has lived ! " 
But here was one who steadily grew to be the emblem 
of our finest order of citizenship, possibly its most 
acceptable type. This, as constantly was evident, be- 
came impressed even upon coarse and ordinary per- 
sons, singly or associated in legislative bodies ; hardly 
judges, one would think, of such a matter, but accept- 
ing without cavil the public conception and the esti- 
mate of the thoughtful and refined. There is good 
reason at the base of every sustained opinion of the 
sort. What gave Bryant just this degree of special 
eminence ? Not alone that he was a virtuous man, 
and a patriot in every sense ; a journalist, linked 
with traditions of sturdy service in the past ; a clear 
and vigorous writer and thinker ; a wise and reverend 
sage, most sound of body and mind. He was not a 
great and representative editor, according to our mod- 
ern standard. Otherwise, he was all these, and in 
their combination held a rank excelled by none and 
reached only by the excepted few. Beyond and in- 
cluding all these, he was a poet. It may be placed 
to the credit of the art of song that, being a person 
of such attributes, the addition of the poetic gift made 
him a bright, particular star. It is the poet, above 
all, that we must observe and estimate. 

Yet in order to discover the quality and limitations 



" Fash- 
ioju'd to 
much 
hotwrJ'* 



TIte '' fore- 
most citi- 
zen:'' 



The poet. 



The man. 



WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 



A typical 
republican. 



Mental 
and moral 
traits. 



His posi- 

iioti 

strength- 
ened by 
worldly 
success. 



of his genius, he must be considered not only as an 
American poet who represented his country at a cer- 
tain time, but as a man speaking for himself.' And in 
this wise, first seeking a key to his literary value, we 
see that he had become a most satisfying type of the 
republican, joining the traditional gravity, purity, and 
patriotic wisdom of the forefathers with the modern- 
ness and freshness of our own day. His life, public 
and private, was in keeping with his speech and writ- 
ings. ;' We often say of a poet or artist that he should 
not be judged like other men by his outward irrele- 
vant mark or habit ; that to see his best, his truest 
self you must read his poems or study his paintings. 
In reading Bryant's prose and verse, and in observing 
the poet himself, our judgments w^ere the same. / He 
always held in view liberty, law, wisdom, piety, faith ; 
his sentiment was unsentimental ; he never whined nor 
found fault with condition or nature ; he was robust, 
but not tyrannical ; frugal, but not too severe ; grave, 
yet full of shrewd and kindly humor. Absolute sim- 
plicity characterized him. \ Ethics were always in sight. 
He was, indeed, an " old man for counsel " ; what he 
learned in youth from the lives and precepts of 
Washington, Hamilton, and their compeers, that he 
taught and practised to the last. His intellectual 
faculties, like his physical, were balanced to the dis- 
creetest level, and this without abasing his poetic fire. 
His genius was not shown by the advance of one 
faculty and the impediment of others ; it was the 
spirit of an even combination, and a fine one. 

It is true that his practical success — the worldly 
substance he had gained by the thrift and prudence 
that " poor Richard's " maxims inculcate — gave him 
a prestige in the wealth-respecting metropolis which as 
a poet alone he could not, in his generation, have 



LENGTH OF SERVICE. 



65 



securecH It brought him near, as Mr. Hazeltine has 
pointed out, to the hosts of the Philistines, but it 
also impressed them with a conviction that there 
must be something in poetry after all. They saw him 
visibly haloed with a distinction beyond that which 
wealth and civic influence could bestow. Besides, 
even Philistia has its cesthetic rituals and pageantry, 
and it was with a gracious and picturesque sense of 
the fitness of things that he bore his stately part in 
our festivals and processions. To this extent he was 
conventional, but he made conventionalism suggestive 
and often the promoter of thought and art. 



II. 

Here, then, was a minstrel who, in appearance, 
more than others of a readier lyrical genius, seemed 
not unlike the legendary bard of Gray : — 

" Tlie poet stood, 
(Loose his beard and hoary hair 
Streamed, like a meteor, to the troubled air), 
And with a master's hand, and prophet's fire, 
Struck the deep sorrows of his lyre." 

Look at the extent of the period through which he 
flourished. He began in the early springtime of 
Wordsworth, and long outlived new men like Baude- 
laire and Poe. The various epochs of his career 
scarcely bear upon our consideration of its product, 
which, after his escape from the manner of Pope, 
was of an even quality during seventy years. In this 
he was fortunate and unfortunate. The former, be- 
cause his early pieces were so noteworthy that, in the 
dearth of American poetry, they at once became home 
classics for a homely people, and one generation after 
another learned them admiringly by heart. At this 
5 



Philistia. 



''The 
Bard.'' 



A pro- 
longed and 
equable ca- 
reer. 



66 



WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 



Hisfeeling 
A merican. 



Emerson^ 
at the Cen- 
tury Club, 
on Bry- 
ant's joth 
lirthday. 



time, even though composed in the latest fashion and 
of greater merit than Bryant's, an author's pieces 
could not obtain for him such recognition and fame. 
But, owing to this otherwise good fortune, he worked 
under restrictions from which he never was even meas- 
urably freed. Before observing these, it again may be 
noted that his poetic career had neither rise, height, 
nor decline. He formed certain methods wholly nat- 
ural to him in early youth, and was at once as admi- 
rable a poet as he ever afterward became. Through- 
out his prolonged term of life he sang without haste 
or effort, and always expressed himself rather than 
the varying methods of the time. 

From the first he was in sympathy with the aspect, 
atmosphere, feeling, of his own country. His ten- 
dency and manner were determined during the idyllic 
period of this republic, when nature and the thoughts 
which it suggested were themes for poets, rather than 
the dramatic relations of man with man. His senti- 
ment was affected by the meditative verse of Cowper 
and Wordsworth, who rose above didacticism, or 
made it imaginative by poetic insight. Emerson said 
of Bryant : " This native, original, patriotic poet. I 
say original : I have heard him charged with being of 
a certain school. I heard it with surprise, and asked, 
What school ? For he never reminded me of Gold- 
smith, or Wordsworth, or Byron, or Moore. I found 
him always original, — a true painter of the face of 
this country, and of the sentiment of his own peo- 
ple." This is, in a sense, true; yet there can be little 
doubt that, in most respects, Wordsworth was the 
master of his youth. All pupils must acknowledge 
masters at the beginning, but Murillo was Murillo 
none the less, although he ground colors for Castillo 
and studied with Velasquez. Bryant ground his colors 



A^A TURPS CELEBRANT. 



67 



in the open air. His originality consisted in deriv- 
ing from his studies a method natural to his own gift 
and condition. The elder Dana puts him on record 
as saying that " upon opening Wordsworth a thousand 
springs seemed to gush up at once in his heart, and 
the face of nature of a sudden to change into a 
strange freshness and life." Certainly he was not 
cradled into poetry by wrong, nor perturbed by the 
wild and morbid passions of a wayward youth. We 
can imagine him a serious and meditative lad, directed 
by the guidance of a scholarly father, well versed in 
the favorite poets of that day, — Pope, Thomson, Aken- 
side, Cowper, — and at first accepting them as models ; 
finally, obtaining for himself the clues to a true per- 
ception of Nature, and with his soul suddenly exalted 
by a sense of her 

" Authentic tidings of invisible things ; 
Of ebb and flow, and ever-during power ; 
And central peace, subsisting at the heart 
Of endless agitation.'" 

This sense was fostered, throughout the changing 
year, by the landscape of the pastoral region of Mas- 
sachusetts in which he had his growth. I have re- 
ferred in a previous chapter to Hugo's works illus- 
trating the conflicts by which man progresses to his 
enfranchisement, the conflicts with Nature, Supersti- 
tion, Tyranny, and Society. From the third of these 
opponents our fathers fled to a new continent, choosing 
to found a nationality, and entering upon that primeval 
conflict with nature which to an already civilized peo- 
ple is not without compensations. It results, like a 
quarrel between generous lovers, in a betrothal of the 
one to the other, and of such an alliance Bryant was 
our celebrant. The delights of nature, and medita- 
tions upon the universality of life and death, withdrew 



// 'ords- 
ivorth' i 
pupil. 



Our tnedi- 
tativc poet 
0/ nature. 



68 



WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 



A llied to 
fiur early 
landscape- 
^ainters. 
See p. 47. 



him from the study of the individual world. Thus he 
became a philosophic minstrel of the woods and wa- 
ters, the foremost of American landscape-poets. In 
the contest with primeval Nature, man signalizes his 
victories by educating and rendering more beautiful 
his captive ; she, in turn, gains a potent influence over 
him, for a long while driving her rivals from his heart, 
and com'^pels him in his art and song to express her 
features and her inspiration. 

The first enduring American school of painting was 
a landscape-school. We have observed the analogy 
between Bryant's poetry and the broad, cool canvas 
of the founders of that school, — the works of Durand, 
Cole, Kensett, Inness, various as they may be in depth, 
tranquillity, or power. Such a harmony exists between 
the soil, the climate, the fauna, and the flora of an 
isothermal zone. Bryant, who at once became emi- 
nent in his special walk, therein excelled and has 
outlasted all his compeers and followers. It is not 
unlikely that he will outlast many of his latest succes- 
sors, notwithstanding his inferiority when persistence 
and minuteness of observation are taken into account. 
Others group together details, compose with enthu- 
siasm, but are deficient in tone, sentiment, imagina- 
tive receptivity. Tone is the one thing needful to a 
true interpretation of nature. Thoreau felt this when 
he wrote in his diary, " I have just heard the flicker 
among the oaks on the hillside ushering in a new 
dynasty. . . . Eternity could not begin with more se- 
curity and momentousness than the Spring. The 
Summer's eternity is reestablished by this note. All 
sights and sounds are seen and heard both in time 
and eternity; and when the eternity of any sight or 
sound strikes the eye or ear, they are intoxicated with 
delight. . , . It is not i?nportant that the poet should 



7'one, and 
hreadth of 
treatment. 



HIS LIMITATIONS. 



69 



say some particular thing, but that he should speak in 
harmony loith nature. The tone and pitch of his voice 
is the main thing.'' Bryant is, in one respect, pecu- 
liarly unmodern. Thoreau, despite his own language, 
caught and observed every detail. Our poet's learn- 
m^i^ was not scientitic ; he lacked the minor vision 
which, an added gift, enables Tennyson and others 
to give such charm and variety to their work. The 
ancients may have recognized all shades and colors, 
but they specified fewer than we specify. Byron, 
among moderns, painted Nature in her simple, broad 
manifestations, — the sea, the mountains, the sky, — 
subordinating her spirit to his own passion, as Bryant 
allies it with his own tenderness and wisdom, but even 
he was not her poet in the delicate, microcosmic, re- 
cent sense. Both certainly lacked the cleverness and 
infinite precision of the new school. Bryant regarded 
nature in its phenomenal aspect, careless of scientific 
realities. What he gained in this wise was the ab- 
sence of disillusionizing fact, and a fuller understand- 
ing of the language of nature's " visible forms " ; \vhat 
he lost was the wide and various range opened by the 
endless avenues of new-found truth. 



III. 



Uftscien 

tlfic 

vision 



Bryaiifs 

litfiita- 

tiojis. 



Right here it is well for us to observe his limit- 
ations as a poet, — limitations so undeniable as to 
be a stumbling-block in the w^ay of those who lightly 
consider his genius, and sometimes to throw him out 
of the sympathetic range of elegant and impartial 
minds. His longevity was not allied with intellectual 
quickness and fertilit}', but seemed almost the bio- 
logic result of inborn slowness and deliberation. He sHj^ness, 
was not flexible, not facile of ear and voice. He con- 



70 



WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 



Infertility. 



Deficient 
in passion, 
humor, 
and indi- 
viduality. 



sorted with nature in its still or majestic moods, and 
derived wisdom and refreshment from its tenderness 
and calm. His gift, as expressed by its product, was 
not affluent, and scarcely availed itself of his length 
of years. His reticence in verse was habitual. In 
old age, poets are apt to write the most, and often 
to the least advantage, but his pen through much of 
this period was chiefly devoted to translation. How 
little of his own poetry he produced in seventy years, 
— a few scant volumes ! Think of Milton, Landor, 
Wordsworth, Tennyson, Hugo, Longfellow ; of the 
impetuous work of Scott and Byron ; of what Shel- 
ley, who gave himself to song, accomplished before 
he died, at twenty-nine. Bryant was thought to be 
cold, if not severe, of temperament. The most fervent 
social passions of his song are those of friendship, of 
filial and fraternal love ; his intellectual passion is 
always under restraint, even when moved by patriot- 
ism, liberty, religious faith. There is -still less of ac- 
tion and dramatic quality in his verse. Humor, the 
overflow of strength, is almost absent from it, — when 
present, sufficiently awkward ; yet it should be noted 
that in conversation, or in the after-dinner talks and 
speeches so frequent in his later years, his humor 
was continuous and charming, full of kindl}^ gossip, 
wisdom, and mirth. He made, as we have seen, little 
advance upon the early standard of his work. It 
would seem as if, under the lessons of a father, "who 
taught him the value of correctness and compression, 
and enabled him to distinguish between poetic en- 
thusiasm and fustian," he there and then matured, 
reached a certain point, and became set and station- 
ary. There are few notable expressions and separable 
lines in his poetry. In his stanzaic verse, following 
the established eighteenth-century patterns, he scarcely 



STYLE AND DICTION. 



71 



can be said to have a style of his own. Stanzas mii^ht 
be quoted from Collins, Goldsmith, Cowper, even Watts, 
any one of which would pass for Bryant's. A painter 
said to me, when I referred to the mannerism of a 
" characteristic " picture by a certain artist, " Yes, but 
it is well that it should not look like anybody else's ; 
it is well to be known by one's manner, and to have 
one's manner known." Where Bryant was most im- 
pressive — that is to say, in his blank-verse poems — 
he had a positive and unmistakable style, quite distinct 
even from that of his master, Wordsworth. Finally, 
his diction, when not confined to that Saxon English at 
every man's use, is bald and didactic, — always senten- 
tious, but less frequently rich and full. He had a lim- 
ited vocabulary at command ; I should think that no 
modern poet, approaching him in fame, has made use 
of fewer words. His range is like that of Goldsmith, 
restricted to the simpler phrases of our tongue. Other 
poets, of an equally pure diction, show here and there, 
by rare and fine words, the extent of their unused re- 
sources, and that they voluntarily confine themselves 
to "the strength of the positive degree." 

In the face of all this, Bryant's poetry has had, and 
will continue to have, a lasting charm for many of the 
noblest minds. Since this is not due to his length 
of years, — for he was not alone in that possession, 
— nor to richness of detail and imagery, nor to his 
having adapted himself, like Whittier, to successive 
changes of thought and diction, how is it that his 
genius triumphed over its confessed limitations ? To 
understand this, his poetry must be judged as a whole, 
and not by its affluence or flexibility ; and it also must 
be studied in connection with its author's surround- 
ings and career. 



A scant vo' 
cabulary. 



72 



WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 



A child of 
the far 
past. 



" The Em- 
bargo^'' 



" Thana- 
topsts.^'' 



lis influ- 
ence on our 
^oets. 



TV. 

The fact must be kept in sight that he was the 
creature of our early period. Owing to an extreme 
precocity, his Hterary career began at a date prior even 
to that which the record of his age would suggest ; 
he was writing and printing verse in a time when the 
eighteenth-century notabilities on his father's shelves 
were still the approved models of style. We find him 
in his fourteenth year publishing T/te Embargo, a po- 
litical satire, of course in rhymed pentameters, and it 
reached a second edition. With the anticipatory in- 
stinct of youth, he shortly passed from the influence 
of Pope to that of Wordsworth, and quite before the 
founder of a natural school brought the writers of Eng- 
land into a saving consciousness of his worth. So 
that Bryant's quick allegiance, fostered by companion- 
ship with nature in his own region, really placed him 
then as far ahead of his time as he seemed, half a 
century afterward, to be behindhand. "Thanatopsis " 
was not printed in the " North American Review " until 
his twenty-first year, but some of it probably was com- 
posed when he was sixteen, and it certainly was com- 
pleted two years before its appearance. Other youths 
have written good verse as precociously, but no one 
else of like years ever composed a single poem that 
had so continuous and elevating an effect upon the 
literature of a country. Its natural tone, its solemn 
and majestic cadences, deeply impressed writers other 
than himself, so that " Thanatopsis," and the lyric, ''To 
a Waterfowl," and various pieces which followed it, 
became the suggestive models of American poets untii 
the rise of Longfellow. I The latter's early verse, and 
more than one poem in the "Voices of the Night," 
show very plainly the influence of Bryant, — that Long* 



POETICAL WORKS. 



fellow was Bryant's pupil until he formed his own pe- 
culiar style, and, in fact, we have his word for it. 

The "Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood," 
given to the " Review" at the same time with "Thana- 
topsis," is of interest as the earliest specimen in blank- 
verse of Br}^ant's nature-painting. His grave, didac- 
tic poem, in Spenserian stanzas. The Ages, which was 
delivered before the Harvard alumni, would make lit- 
tle impression in these days, but nothing so good of 
its kind then had been written in America, and it is 
marked by occasional fervor and touches of imagina- 
tion. The author's specific dignity of handling is 
everywhere maintained. " The Ages " was printed at 
Cambridge, together with his other poems then written, 
in a little book of forty-four pages, now excessively 
rare. The product of his muse grew very slowly ; he 
was nearins: middle ao:e before there was enough of it 
to make a collectiv^e edition. The London counter- 
part of this was edited, with a laudatory preface, by 
Washington Irving, and gave the poet a foreign repu- 
tation. His verse was received as the metrical sup- 
plement of Cooper's prose, and as confirming Irving's 
praise of its imaginative and thoroughly national de- 
lineation of American landscape "in its wild, solitary, 
and magnificent forms." Small volumes of new poems 
appeared in 1840 and 1844, and illustrated editions of 
Bryant's poetical works, which foreign and native art- 
ists made attractive, were brought out in Philadelphia 
and New York respectively. When he reached the age 
of threescore years and ten a collection was made of 
his later poems. This embraced not a few as sonorous 
and imaginative as " Thanatopsis " and " A Forest 
Hymn," and lyrics in every way equal to those of his 
youthful prime ; yet, if I remember rightly, there was 
little sale for it, and the chief profit which the poet and 



''The 
Agues'" ; 
read before 
the *. B. K. 
of Har- 
vard ^ A ug. 
30, 1821. 



''Poems,'' 
1S21. 



"■ Poems,'''' 

1832. 



" The 
Fou7itain, 
and Other 
Poems,'''' 
1842. 

" The 
White- 
footed 
Deer,"" etc. y 
1844. 

Illustrated 
Editions, 
1847, 1S58. 

" Thirty 
Poems;'' 
1864. 



74 



WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 



No change 
in style. 



The poefs 
life and oc- 
cupations. 



Distaste 
for the 
law. 



journal- 
ism. 



his publishers received from his metrical works came 
through new editions, some of which were elaborately 
illustrated, that were issued when his conspicuousness 
as a personaye, as a striking figure at all civic and lit- 
erary gatherings of note, increased with his increasing 
years. The Thirty Poems, in fact, displayed the same 
inflexible restriction to an early key, now quite out of 
popular accord; not a particle of concession, — scarcely 
any consciousness of the radical changes, the advance 
in diction, imagery, variety of motive, and rhythm, ef- 
fected by successive generations. 

All this indicated a rigid and self-contained nature, 
but his long absorption in the practical affairs of life 
must be taken into account. As a youth, with slender 
means, he started out to make a living ; first, as a law- 
yer in Berkshire County. After nine years at the bar, 
he threw up his profession, in view of chances offered 
by a growing literary reputation, and somewhat out of 
temper with the chicanery which even then seemed in- 
separable from the practice of the law, and which in 
any form was repugnant to his life-long and Roman 
sense of justice. Yet in the very traits we are observ- 
ing — in diffident reserve, apparent coldness, real 
warmth of feeling and personal tenderness vouched 
for by those who knew him best, respect for abstract 
truth and right, wrath vehemently aroused by public 
and private wrongs — be was not unlike the great ad- 
vocate, Charles O'Conor, who nevertheless devoted his 
life to enforcing the law's original claim to the perfec- 
tion of reason and the majesty of power without taint. 
Bryant came to New York and entered upon journal- 
ism as the editor of a literary magazine, but soon 
found himself connected with the daily newspaper of 
which he ultimately became the chief proprietor and ed- 
itor, and so remained until his dying day. During the 



NOT DEVOTED TO SONG. 



75 



early portion of this town-life he took an active part, 
that of a leader, in what there was of literary effort 
and production, — associated with Dana, Halleck, 
Drake, Verplanck, Sands, young Willis, and other 
poets and wits of the time. But he became more en- 
grossed in political and economic journalism, seldom 
yielding to the lyrical impulse, and when in age he 
again found leisure and desire for song, his voice had 
grown somewhat alien to modern ears, although there 
is no sign that he himself perceived it. I am speak- 
ing of his poetry : at intervals he WTOte books of 
travels, made up chiefly of letters to the " Evening 
Post," besides many essays, addresses, orations, which 
were always clear and adequate, but rarely displaying 
anything like genius, or striking in their effect. 

It is quite plain that he did not give himself to 
poetry, but added poetry to his ordinary life and oc- 
cupation. The reverse of this, onl}'-, can make the 
greatest poet. His lack of devotion to a jealous mis- 
tress WMS the fault of his time, and of circumstances 
which decided his course in life. To him the parting 
of the ways came early ; and what was there in our 
■literar}- atmosphere and opportunities, sixty years ago, 
to make poetry the vocation of any thorough-trained, 
aspiring, and resolute man ? The nation called for 
workers, journalists, practical teachers. If, after ac- 
complishing their daily tasks, they found time to sing 
a song, it thanked them, and did little more. Poetry 
was the surplusage of Bryant's labors, or, more likely, 
their restoring complement. In all likelihood his med- 
itations would not have been expressed in song but 
for the influence of those early readings, under a dis- 
cerning father's care. Otherwise, though he could not 
have failed to become a writer, as a poet he might have 
been one of the mute oracles whose lot is mourned by 
Wordsworth : — 



A b sorp- 
tion in this 
profession. 



" Letters 
of a Trav- 
eller,'''' and 
similar 
prose 
works, 
1850-69. 

" Orations 
and A d- 
dresses,^^ 
1873 ; and 
see his 
'"'' Life and 
Works,''' 
by God- 
win, 1883. 

Poetry lit" 
tie vtore 
titan his 
avocation. 

Cp. " Vic- 
tor iati 
Poets " .• 
//. 81, 82. 



1(> 



WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 



A hsolute 
sincerity. 



Effect of 
early stud- 
ies on lit- 
erary dic- 
tion. 



— " men endowed with highest gifts, 
The vision and the faculty divine ; 
Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse, 
Which, in the docile season of their youth, 
It was denied them to acquire." 

But read "The Evening Wind," see him in his most 
spontaneous mood, and you feel that, once having 
learned the art of verse, the poet within him thereafter 
must break out from time to time. He did not hoard 
his reputation. But his passion and tenderness did 
not so readily force him to metrical expression as a 
feebler amount of either has forced many a weak but 
more facile singer trained in a less rude and inartistic 
age. 

On the other hand, he never, by any chance, affected 
passion or set himself to artificial song. He had the 
triple gift of Athene, " self-reverence, self-knowledge, 
self-control." He was incapable of pretending to rap- 
ture that he did not feel, and this places him far above 
a host of those who, without knowing it, hunt for emo- 
tions and make poetry little better than a trade. As 
for his diction, he began when there was no Feast of 
Pentecost with its gift of tongues. I think that the 
available portion of a poet's vocabulary is that which 
he acquires in youth, during his formative period. It 
is easier for an adult to learn a foreign language than 
to enlarge greatly his native range of words, and have 
them at every-day command. Bryant's early reading 
was before the great revival which brought into use the 
romance-words of Chaucer, Spenser, and the Eliza- 
bethan age. It was derived from the poorest, if the 
smoothest, English period — that which began with 
Pope and ended with Cowper. The rich advantage 
of a modern equipment is visible in Tennyson, who 
had Keats and Shelley for his predecessors ; not to 



DORIC S/.UPLICITy. 



77 



consider Swinburne, who, above his supernatural gifts 
of rhythm and hmguage, owes much to youthful explo- 
rations in classic and Continental tongues. No doubt 
Bryant's models confirmed his natural restrictions of 
speech. But even this narrow verbal range has made 
his poetry strong and pure ; and now, when expression 
has been carried to its extreme, it is an occasional re- 
lief to recur to the clearness, to the exact appreciation 
of words, discoverable in every portion of his verse 
and prose. It is like a return from a florid renaissance 
to the antique ; and indeed there w^as something Doric 
in Bryant's nature. His diction, like his thought, often 
refreshes us as the shadow of a great rock in a weary 
land. He refused to depart from what seemed to him 
the natural order of English verse, — that order which 
comes to the lips of childhood, and is not foreign to 
any life or age. The thought was like the measure, 
that which was old wdth the fathers and is young in 
our o\vT\ time, the pure philosophy of nature's lessons. 
Give his poems a stud}^ and their simplicity is their 
charm. How easy it seems to WTite those natural 
lines ! Yet it is harder than to catch a hundred fan- 
tastic touches of W'Ord-painting and dexterous sound. 
He never was obscure, because he dared not and would 
not go beyond his proper sight and knowledge, and 
this was the safeguard of his poetry, his prose, and his 
almost blameless life. 

Verse, to Bryant, wms the outflow of his deepest 
emotions ; a severe taste and discreet temperament 
made him avoid the study of decoration. Thus he was 
always direct and intelligible, and appealed to the com- 
mon people as strongly as to the select few. I have 
compared him to our stately men of an older time. 
Amonfr others Daniel Webster miMit be mentioned as 
one whose mood and rhetoric are in keeping with the 



A pure 
a7id sivipll 
style. 



Webster 
and Bry- 
ant. 



78 



WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 



Bryants 

favorite 

measures. 



The iam- 
hie quat- 
rain. 



poetry of Bryant. Like Webster, our poet always se- 
lected the leading, impressive thought, and brushed the 
rest aside. This he put in with a firm and glowing 
touch. Many have thought the works of both the 
statesman and the poet conventional, but the adjective 
might be brought to apply to all simple and essential 
truth and diction. Adopting Arnold's distinction, we 
see that Bryant's simplicity was not simplesse, but 
sinipUcite. Everett made a good presentation of its 
strongest claim when he said that poetry, at its best, is 
" easily intelligible, touching the finest chords of taste 
and feeling, but never striving at effect. This is the 
highest merit in every department of literature, and 
in poetry it is well called inspiration. Surprise, con- 
ceit, strange combinations of imagery and expression, 
may be successfully managed, but it is merit of an 
inferior kind. The beautiful, pathetic, and sublime 
are always simple and natural, and marked by a cer- 
tain serene unconsciousness of effort." " This," he 
added, " is the character of Mr. Bryant's poetry." 

V. 

Let us again, then, observe its forms and themes, 
and discover clues to the quality of the genius which 
idealized them. Bryant's chosen measures were few 
and simple. Two were special favorites, most fre- 
quently used for his pictures of nature and his medi- 
tations on the soul of things, and in their use he was 
a master. 

One was the iambic quatrain, in octosyllabic verse, 
of which the familiar stanza, " Truth crushed to earth 
will rise again," may be recalled as a specimen. Many 
of his best modern pieces are composed in this meas- 
ure, so evenly and firmly that the slightest change 



HIS BLA NK- 1 I^RSE. 



79 



would mar their sound and flow. " A Day Dream," 
written in the poet's old age, is perfect of its kind, 
and may rank almost with Collins's nonpareil, "To 
fair Fidele's Grassy Tomb." AVitness such stanzas as 
these : — 

I sat and watched the eternal flow 

Of those smooth billows toward the shore, 
While quivering lines of light below 
Ran with them on the ocean floor." 

" Then moved their coral lips ; a strain 
Low, sweet and sorrowful, I heard, 
As if the murmurs of the main 

Were shaped to syllable and word." 

His variations upon the iambic quatrain, as in the 
celebrated poems, "To a Waterfowl " and " The Past," 
are equally successful. The second of the forms re- 
ferred to is that blank-verse in which his supremacy 
always was recognized. Among the distinct phases 
of our grandest English measure that have been ob- 
served in literature, Bryant's may be classed with the 
Reflective, of which Wordsworth, succeeding the di- 
dacticians, held unquestioned control, but from the 
outset it was marked by a quality plainly his own. 
The essence of its cadence, pauses, rhythm, should be 
termed American, and it is the best ever written in the 
New World. Blank-verse is the easiest and the most 
difficult of all measures ; the poorest in poor hands ; 
the finest when written by a true poet. W^hoever 
essays it is a poet disrobed ; he must rely upon his 
natural gifts ; his defects cannot be hidden. In this 
measure Bryant was at his height, and he owes to it the 
most enduring portion of his fame. However narrow 
his range, we must own that he was first in the first. 
He reached the upper air at once in " Thanatopsis," 
and again and again, though none too frequently, he 



His blanks 
verse. 



8o 



WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 



A pano- 
ramic se- 
ries. 



Lofty con- 
templative 
■^oents. 



renewed his flights, and, like his own waterfowl, pur- 
sued his "solitary way." 

The finest and most sustained of his poems of na- 
ture are those written in blank-verse. At intervals so 
rare throughout his life as to resemble the seven-year 
harvests, or the occasional wave that overtops the rest, 
he composed a series of those pieces which now form 
a unique panorama of nature's aspects, moving to the 
music of lofty thoughts and melodious words. Such 
are " A Winter Piece," the " Inscription for the En- 
trance to a Wood," " A Forest Hymn," " Summer 
Wind," "The Prairies," "The Fountain," " A Hymn 
of the Sea," " A Rain-Dream " ; also a few written 
late in life, showing that the eye of the author of 
" Thanatopsis " had not been dimmed, nor was his 
natural force abated : these are " The Constellations," 
" The River, by Night," and " Among the Trees." 
In all the treatment is large and ennobling, and dis- 
tinctly marks each as Bryant's. The method, that of 
invocation, somewhat resembles the manner of Col- 
eridge's Hymn in the Vale of Chamouni. When in a 
less enraptured strain, they exhibit repose, feeling, wise 
and reverent thought. 

In the same eloquent verse, and with like caesural 
pauses and inflections, we find his more purely medi- 
tative poems, upon an equal or still higher plane 
of feeling, — "Thanatopsis," the "Hymn to Death," 
" Earth," " An Evening Revery," " The Antiquity of 
Freedom," and one of his latest and longest, " The 
Flood of Years." Yet, in both his reflective verse 
and that devoted to nature, he often employed lyrical 
measures with equal excellence ; as in the breezy, 
exquisite poem on "Life," "The Battle Field," "The 
Future Life," and " The Conqueror's Grave," — the 
latter one of his most elevating pieces. Especially 



AN ELEMENTAL IMAGINATION 



8i 



in his lyrics he seemed like a wind-harp yielding ten- 
der music in response to every suggestion of the great 
Mother whom he loved. Such poems as "June," 
"The Death of the Flowers," and "The Evening 
Wind " show this, and also indicate the limits within 
which his song was spontaneous. Each is the gen- 
uine expression of a personal mood, and has by this 
merit taken its place in metrical literature. 

At last, then, we are brought to a recognition of the 
power in Bryant's verse which has given him a station 
above that which he could hope to win by its amount 
or range. It is the eleiiiciital quality of his song. Like 
the bards of old, his spirit delights in fire, air, earth, 
and water, — the apparent structures of the starry 
heavens, the mountain recesses, and the vasty deep. 
These he apostrophizes, but over them and within them 
he discerns and bows the knee to the omniscience of 
a protecting Father, a creative God. Poets, eminent 
in this wise, have been gifted always with imagmatiojt. 
The verse of Bryant often is full of high imaginings. 
Select any portion of " Thanatopsis " : — 

'* Pierce the Barcan wilderness, 
Or lose thyself in "the continuous woods 
Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound 
Save his own dashings — yet the dead are there!" 

or this, from " The Prairies " : — 

" The bee 

Fills the savannas with his murmurings, 
And hides his sweets, as in the golden age, 
Within the hollow oak. I listen long 
To his domestic hum, and think I hear 
The sound of that advancing multitude 
Which soon shall fill these deserts. From the ground 
Comes up the laugh of children, the soft voice 
Of maidens, and the sweet and solemn hymn 
6 



A bard of 
tlw ele- 
ments. 



tion. 



82 



WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 



His 

" hattd on 
Nature^ s 
keys." 



Of Sabbath worshippers. The low of herds 
Blends with the rustling of the heavy grain 
Over the dark-brown furrows. All at once 
A fresher wind sweeps by and breaks my dream. 
And I am in the wilderness alone." 

Read the entire poem of " Earth." Take such stan- 
zas as this, from " The Past " : — 

"Far in thy realm withdrawn 
Old empires sit in sullenness and gloom, 

And glorious ages gone 
Lie deep within the shadow of thy womb " ; 

such phrases as, 

"' Old Ocean's gray and melancholy waste " ; 

or, from "A Rain-Dream," an impersonation of 

"the Wind of night, 
A lonely wanderer between earth and cloud. 
In the black shadow and the chilly mist, 
Along the streaming mountain-side, and through 
The dripping woods, and o'er the plashy fields, 
Roaming and sorrowing still, like one who makes 
The journey of life alone, and nowhere meets 
A welcome or a friend, and still goes on 
In darkness." 

Take passages Uke these, — and they are not infre- 
quent in Bryant's poetry, — make allowance for the 
law by which any real poet's work is sure to grow 
upon us in close examination, and we still are con- 
fronted with an " elemental " imagination often higher 
than that of more productive poets. Modern singers 
excel in richness of phrase, redundant imagery, elab- 
orate word-painting ; but every period has its fore- 
runners and masters, and our rising men must ac- 
knowledge Bryant as a laurelled master of the early 
American School. He seldom touched the keys, yet 
they gave out an organ tone. 



TRANSLATION OF HOTTER. 



83 



Indeed, when lie essayed piano-music, and was in 
a light or fanciful mood, he was unable to vie with 
sprightlier and defter hands. His lyrics, in swift and 
simple measures, h;ul a ringing" (jualily, noticeable in 
the " Song of Marion's Men," the best of them, and in 
"The Hunter of the Prairies." A pleasant surprise 
awaits us in certain later pieces, such as " The Plant- 
ing of the Apple-Tree," the delicate " Snow-Shower," 
and " Robert of Lincoln," — so full of bird-music and 
fancy. Usually it was with an air of uncouthness and 
doubt that he ventured beyond established precedents, 
as if he were in strange waters and would gladly touch 
firm land ; but then, he seldom ventured. As he 
grew older, beyond the asperities of life, he became 
less brooding, sad, and grave. His Fancy, what there 
was of it, came in his later years, and suggested two 
of his longest pieces, " Sella " and " The Little People 
of the Snow," tales of folk-lore, in which his lighter 
and more graceful handling of blank-verse may be 
studied without fatigue. 

VI. 

A SHREWD confidence in his own mental and bodily 
strength was justified by the execution, in his old age, 
of that monumental task, — a full translation of the 
epics of Homer. Such labor undoubtedly is adapted 
to the afternoon of life, when creative energy is spent 
and the discretionary faculties are trained to their ex- 
treme ; still, the completed evidence of Bryant's vigor, 
even at life's sunset, is hardly less notable than Lan- 
dor's retention of ideality to his ninetieth year. 

After the manner of De Senechite^ one well might 
recommend this special labor to a poet of Bryant's 
cast, as the solace of his advancing age. There was 



Slij^ht lyr- 
ical facid- 



Fancy . 



His iraftS' 
latioH of 
Hovicr : 
" Tlie 
Iliad,'' 
1870; 

Odyssey,'''' 
1871. 



A congeTtf^ 
ial task. 



84 



WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 



flow Jar 
Bryanfs 
work may 
ie com- 
piended. 



The de- 

%criptive 

passages. 

Od. v., 
43-74- 



something in the old bard himself which his admirers 
called Homeric ; and there were these traits, at least, 
common to the genius of the epics and that of their 
translator, — a primitive way of regarding things, a 
stately utterance, a vision clear and suited to the 
theme. The best characteristics of Bryant's The Iliad 
and The Odyssey are : (i), general, though not invaria= 
ble, fidelity to the text, as compared with former ver- 
sions by poets of equal rank ; (2), simplicity of phrase 
and style ; (3), approximate transfusion of the heroic 
spirit; (4), a purity of language that pleases a sensible 
reader. It is not likely that Bryant possessed a schol- 
ar's mastery of even the familiar Ionic Greek, but the 
text of Homer long has been substantially agreed upon 
by European editors, there are special lexicons devoted 
to it, and it is faithfully rendered in German and Eng- 
lish translations : so that the poet could have little 
trouble in adjusting it to his metrical needs. His 
choice of words is meagre, and so — in a modern sense 
— was that of Homer ; there is no lack of minstrels, 
nowadays, who ransack their vocabularies to fill our 
jaded ears with " words, words, words." As a pre- 
sentment of standard English the value of these trans- 
lations is beyond serious cavil. When they are com- 
pared with the most faithful and poetic blank-verse 
rendering which preceded them, the work of Cowper, 
they show an advance in both accuracy and poetic 
quality. Lord Derby's contemporaneous version is 
dull and inferior. Bryant naturally handled to best 
advantage his descriptive passages, — the verses in the 
Fifth Odyssey, which narrate the visit of Hermes to 
Calypso, furnishing a case in point. His rendering of 
these is more literal than the favorite transcript by 
Leigh Hunt, and excels all others in ease and choice 
of language. The following extract from another pas- 



IDIOMATIC STYLE. 



85 



sage will show how well he occasionally substitutes, for 
the Greek color and rising harmony, the gloom and 
vigor of our Saxon tongue : — 

" The steady wind 
Swelled out the canvas in the midst ; the ship 
Moved on, the dark sea roaring round her keel, 
As swiftly through the waves she cleft her way. 
And when the rigging of that swift black ship 
Was firmly in its place, they filled their cups 
With wine, and to the ever-living gods 
Poured out libations, most of all to one, 
Jove's blue-eyed daughter. Thus through all that night 
And all the ensuing morn they held their way." 

Very often, in fact, where the original text is high- 
sounding and polysyllabic, he obtains his English 
effect by reliance upon the strength of monosyllabic 
words : — 

" For his is the black doom of death, ordained 
By the great gods." 

" Hear me yet more : 
When she shall smite thee with her wand, draw forth 
Thy good sword from thy thigh and rush at her 
As if to take her life, and she will crouch 
In fear." 

" I hate 
To tell again a tale once fully told." 

But occasionally he uses to advantage the Latinism 
peculiar to his reflective poems. Such lines as Shake- 
speare's 

" The multitudinous seas incarnadine " 

show by what process the twin forces of our language 
are fully brought in play. Verses of this sort, formed 
by the juxtaposition of the numerous Greek particles 
with ringing derivative and compound words, make up 
a good deal of the Homeric song. Bryant accordingly 
varied his translation with lines which remind us of 
" Thanatopsis " or " A Forest Hymn " : — 



Od. II. 
427-434' 



Style and 
language. 



86 



WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 



The meas- 
ure chose7i 
■(or this 
transla- 
tion. 



"The innumerable nations of the dead." 

" That strength and these unconquerable hands." 

"And downward plunged the unmanageable rock." 

His paraphrases of the Greek idioms are noticeable for 
English idiomatic purity, so much so that the idea of 
a translation frequently absents itself from the reader's 
mind. While in one respect this is the perfection of 
such work, in another it is the loss of that charm per- 
taining to the sense of all rare things which are foreign 
to our own mode and period. His restraint, also, is 
carried to the verge of sterility by the repetition of 
certain adjectives as the equivalents of Greek words 
varying among themselves. The words " glorious " 
and '' sagacious," for example, not uncommon in this 
translation, do not always represent the same, or even 
synonymous, expressions in the original text. But 
some of his epithets and renderings, such as "the 
large-souled Ulysses," "the unfruitful sea," "passed 
into the Underworld," and his retention of Cowper's 
paraphrase of yepwi/ aAto?, " the Ancient of the Deep," 
give a more elevated and poetical tone to the work. 
It must be acknowledged that these translations, ex- 
ecuted without haste or rest during eight years of an 
old man's life, are not without dignity and value. The 
question is debatable whether there was any real need 
of a new rendering of Homer into our rhymeless iam- 
bic pentameter. If so, did Mr. Bryant's labors fill the 
void ? It was proper and natural that he should make 
blank-verse the vehicle for his use, as the one above 
all others in which he was sure to reach a measure 
of success. And had Tennyson undertaken the full 
translation of Homer, after the manner indicated by 
that magnificent early production, the " Morte d'Ar< 
thur," something very fine would have been the re^ 



THE VERSE EMPLOYED. 



87 



suit. Bryant's verse is noticeably different from that 
of Tennyson. Only in an occasional passage, like the 
following, the one reminds us of the other : — 

" The formidable baldric, on whose band 
Of gold were sculptured marvels, — forms of bears, 
Wild boars, grim lions, battles, skirmishings, 
And death by wounds, and slaughter." 

Yet in every blank -verse rendering there is an in- 
efficacy, — least felt, perhaps, in those elevated pas- 
sages, the nery glow of which for a time lifts us 
above contemplation of the translator's art. In the 
more mechanical portions blank -verse cannot of it- 
self, by the music and flexibility of its structure, have 
the converse effect of holding us above the level of 
the theme. Here the deficiency is painful ; and for 
this reason, amongst others, that in Greek the names 
of the most common objects are imposing and me- 
lodious. Those lines whose poverty of thought is 
greatest, upborne by the long roll of the hexameter, 
have a quality as aristocratic as the grace and dig- 
nity of a Spanish beggar. A translator discovers the 
weakness of blank - verse in those intercalary lines 
which are such a feature 'in Homer, and which consti- 
tute a kind of refrain, affording rest at intervals along 
the torrent of the song. In the best lyric and epic 
poetry of all nations a disdain of minor changes is 
observable ; but Bryant, seeing that blank-verse does 
little honor to a purely mechanical ofifiice, often varied 
his translations of such lines, instead of following 
the Homeric method of recurrence to one chosen 
form. The very directness of his syntax, leading 
to the rejection, even, of such inversions as Tenny- 
son's 

*' To whom replied King Arthur, much in wrath " 



cacy oj 
blnnk- 



Prosaic 
lapses. 



88 



WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 



L-ack of 

■movement. 



Cp. " Vic- 
torian 
Poets " : 
f. 1 66. 



made it almost prosaic in this respect. Such lines 

as 

" Telemachus, the prudent, thus rejoined " 

" And then discreet Telemachus replied " 
"Ulysses, the sagacious, answered her" 

are tame substitutes for the courtly and sonorous in- 
terludes, 

Uriv 8' av T7]\4fxaxos TreTruvfx4vos avriov rjvda' 

We feel still more the shortcomings of blank-verse in 
the paraphrases of those resonant dactylic lines, which 
make up so large a portion of the Iliad and Odys- 
sey, and give splendor to the movement of whole 
cantos. We might cite innumerable examples, like 
the following : — - 

'^Hfj.os S' ripiyeueia (pdvr] poSoSaKrvXos *Ji(6s. 

" But when the Morn, 
The rosy-fingered child of Dawn, looked forth." 

Avrap eVel irora/xoLO AtVev p6ov TlKeavoTo 
NtjCs, aTrh 8' 'Ik€To Kvjxa OaXdaarjS evpviropoio. 

" Now when our bark had left Oceanus 
And entered the great deep," 

All this points to the one deficiency in a blank- 
verse translation, and this, unquestionably, relates to 
the movement Can a version in our slow and stately 
iambics, which are perfectly adequate to represent 
the dialogue of the Greek dramas, approximate to 
the rhythmic effect of a measure which originally was 
chanted or intoned ? The rush of epic song has 
been caught by Chapman, in his " Iliads," and to 
some extent by Pope and others, at the expense of 
matter and style. But only in one instance, that I 
now recall, has modern blank-verse attained to any- 
thing like the Homeric swiftness. I refer to the 



'ENGLISH hexameter: 



89 



tournament scene, which closes the fifth book of 
'• The Princess." Even the splendid movement of 
this passage is unrestful, and like the lierce spurt 
of a racer that can win by a dash, but has not the 
bottom needed for a three-mile heat. 

To the present date I know of no metrical version 
of Greek hexameter text, epic or idyllic (unless in 
brief experiments like one or two of Dean Haw- 
trey's), that can vie in beauty and tidelity with the 
prose rendering of Homer by Butcher and Lang, and 
with I\Ir. Lang's exquisite translation of Theocritus, 
Bion, and Moschus. 

There are two of our metrical forms in which, I 
think, the Homeric rhythmus may be more nearly 
approached than by the means of blank-verse. A 
good objection has been made to the rhymed heroic 
measure, as used by Pope (and by Dryden in his 
Virgil), that it disturbs the force of the original by 
connecting thoughts not meant to be connected ; that 
it causes a "balancing of expression in the two lines 
of which it consists, w^hich is wholly foreign to the 
Homeric style." Professor Hadley suggested that this 
might be obviated by a return to the measure as writ- 
ten by Chaucer, not pausing too often at the rhymes, 
but frequently running the sentences over, with the 
caesura varied as in blank-verse. This usage, in fact, 
was revived by Keats and Leigh Hunt, and is nota- 
ble in William Morris's flowing poetr)', to which 
Hadley referred for illustration. Chapman translated 
the Odyssey upon this plan, but in a slovenly fashion, 
not to be compared with his other Homeric work. 
There is room, perhaps, for a new translation of 
Homer into the rh3'med Chaucerian verse. The mer- 
its of the so-called " English hexameter " were long 
ago so clearly set forth by Mr. Arnold, the main 



Rece7tt 
prose 
triifisla- 
tions. 



A vailable 
fortns of 
verse- 



The 

rhymed 

iambic 

pentame' 

ter. 



The 

" English 

hexame- 
ter:' 



90 



WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 



See " No. 
A m. Rev.'''' 
CXII. 
328. 



A test. 



Cp. ''Vic- 
torian 
Poets " .• 
A 251. 



See Chap. 
VI. 



points of whose .argument seem to me irrefutable, that 
I shall write at no great length upon it here. Pro- 
fessor C. T, Lewis, in his brilliant review of Bry- 
ant's Homer, after justly stating that our hexameter 
verse could not be written classically, says that it is 
peculiar among English metres, because it is so very 
like prose. It is less metrical than any form of Eng- 
lish verse. "Blank-verse," he adds, "can stoop to the 
simplest speech without approaching prose." True, 
but it does not always do so. Run together the 
opening lines of Bryant's Odyssey, which in Greek 
are made highly poetical by the structure and sound, 
and see if they have not a prosaic effect : — 

" Tell me, O Muse, of that sagacious man who, 
having overthrown the sacred town of Ilium, wan- 
dered far and visited the capitals of many nations, 
learned the customs of their dwellers, and endured 
great suffering on the deep." 

Now where, in Mr. Kingsley's " Andromeda," — 
a fair specimen of English hexameter, with liquid 
cadences throughout, — can five lines be made to 
read like that ? In a future chapter, when we come 
to Longfellow's " Evangeline," it may be worth while 
to consider the features that this measure is likely to 
assumco No master has brought it to the perfection 
which attracts both scholars and laymen ; yet I am 
confident that we shall have an English verse of six 
feet, with the billowy roll of the classical hexameter, 
and that by its form it will be suited to the repro- 
duction of Homer, line for line. If Bayard Taylor, 
who, by argument and practice, demonstrated the 
value of Form to the translator's work, could reach 
so near his mark in rendering the hundred metres 
of " Faust," surely there is encouragement for a 
future attempt to represent more closely the one de- 



A DEFEXDER OF LIBERTY. 



91 



fiant measure of lieroic song. To the point made 
that English is too consonantal for such representa- 
tion, we reply that it is no more consonantal in hex- 
ameter than in pentameter verse, and that, of the two 
kinds, the former is nearer to the verse of Homer. 
This objection would apply more forcibly to the still 
harsher German ; yet we conceive Voss's Iliad to have 
given German readers a truer idea of the original 
than any English translation has conveyed to our- 
selves. 

In a review of Bryant's Odyssey, at the date of its 
completion, I criticised his employment of those Ro- 
man names by which the deities of Grecian mythol- 
ogy have been familiarly known. It was a failure to 
realize the advances in taste and learning even then 
nearly popularized by Grote, Tennyson, the Brownings, 
Swinburne, and by younger poets and scholars with- 
out end. If Lord Derby in England, and Mr. Bryant 
in America, had adopted the true nomenclature, the 
transition speedily would have been complete. But 
the order of our poet's mind, even in its epic mood, 
was slow and stately, Latin rather than Grecian. 
Hence, as a translator from the Spanish he was suc- 
cessful, reproducing the calm and royal quality of 
Castilian song. 

VII. 

American poets have been true to their own land 
in expressing its innate freedom, patriotism, aspiring 
resolve. Throughout Bryant's life his scattered poems 
upon political events, at home and abroad, have been 
consecrated to freedom and its devotees. He breathed 
a spirit of independence with the wind of his native 
hills. The country is the open wild of liberty. All 
our poets of nature are poets of human rights. Should 



See ''The 
A tlantic 
Monthly, '''' 
May, 1872. 



Poets of 
freedortu 



92 



WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 



Bryani's 
foem on 
the Eman- 
cipation, 



America ever become monarchical it will be due to 
the influence of cities and those bred in them, Bry- 
ant's regard for law, for the inheritance of just polit- 
ical and social systems, was unquestionable. He might 
have been a constitutionalist in France j here, though 
bred a Federalist, he was sure to oppose undue cen- 
tralization. After all, he was of no party further than 
he conceived it to be right. Witness his contest with 
slavery and his desertion of a Democracy which finally, 
he thought, belied its name. That he did not, with 
Lowell and Whittier, summon his muse to oppose the 
greatest wrong of our history was owing to two causes : 
First, it was his lyrical habit to observe and idealize 
general principles, the abstract rather than the con- 
crete. Whittier's poems are alive with incident, and 
burn with personal feeling. Once, only, Bryant wrote 
a mighty poem on Slavery : when it had received its 
death-blow, when the struggle ended and the right pre- 
vailed. Jehovah had conquered, His children were 
free, and Bryant raised a chant like that of Miriam, — 

"O thou great Wrong, that, through the slow-paced years, 
Didst hold thy millions fettered ; 

" Go, now, accursed of God, and take thy place 
With hateful memories of the elder time ! 



" Lo ! the foul phantoms, silent in the gloom 
Of the flown ages, part to yield thee room." 

This swelling poem, " The Death of Slavery,'' was 
not needed to assure us that the cause of freedom 
touched his heart. For, secondly, his true counterpart 
to Whittier's work was to be found in the vigorous 
antislavery assaults he made for years in the journal 
of which he died the editor. There it was that he 
exercised his influence and mental power upon "the 



THE CLOSIXG SCEXE. 



93 



rebuke of fraud and oppression of whatever clime or 
race," 

His prose labors were an outlet, constantly afforded 
in his journalism, through which much of that energy 
escaped whicli otherwise would have varied the mo- 
tives and increased the body of his song. On the 
whole, though he was without a philologist's equipment, 
there were few better writers of simple, nervous Eng- 
lish. He made it for half a century the instrument of 
his every-day thought and purpose ; as a leader-writer, 
a traveller and correspondent, an essayist and orator, 
a political disputant. His polemic vigor and acerbity 
were worked off in his middle-life editorials, and in de- 
fence of what he thought to be right. There he was, 
indeed, unyielding, and other pens recall the traditions 
of his political controversies. He never confused the 
distinct provinces of prose and verse. Refer to any- 
thing written by him, of the former kind, and you find 
plainness, well-constructed syntax, free from any cheap 
gloss of rhetoric or the " jingle of an effeminate 
rhythm." 

As in written prose and verse, so in speech and 
public offices. The long series of addresses on civic 
occasions closed with one which brought him to his 
death. Mastering his work to the very end, it was his 
lot at last to bow, as became a poet of Nature, be- 
fore her own life-nurturing, life-destroying forces^ and 
thus submit to her kindest universal law^ The ques- 
tion of a passage in " An Evening Revery " was an- 
swered, and the prophecy fulfilled : — 

" O thou great Movement of the Universe, 
Or Change, or Flight of Time — for ye are one I 
That bearest, silently, this visible scene 
Into night's shadow and the streaming rays 
Of starlight, whither art thou bearing me ? 



His prost 
labors- 



(V. C. B. 
died in 
Ne7V Yor':^ 
N. v., 
Jutie 12, 



94 



WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT, 



I feel the mighty current sweep me on, 

Yet know not whither. Man foretells afar 

The courses of the stars ; the very hour 

He knows when they shall darken or grow bright | 

Yet doth the eclipse of Sorrow and of Death 

Come unforewarned." 



CHAPTER IV. 



JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 



I. 

A PLEASANT story, that went the round shortly 
after the close of our Civil War, shows the char- 
acter of Whittier's hold upon his countrymen. It was 
said that one among a group of prominent men, when 
conversation on politics and finance began to lag, 
asked the question. Who is the best American poet? 
Horace Greeley, who was of the party, replied with 
the name of Whittier, and his judgment was instantly 
approved by all present. These active, practical Amer- 
icans, patriots or demagogues, — some of them, doubt- 
less, of the "heated barbarian" type, — for once found 
their individual preferences thus expressed and in ac- 
cord. At that climacteric time the Pleiad of our elder 
poets was complete and shining, — not a star was lost. 
But the instinct of these stern, hard-headed men was 
in favor of the Quaker bard, the celibate and prophetic 
recluse ; he alone appealed to the poetic side of their 
natures. We do not hold a press item to absolute ex- 
actness in its report of words. The epithet " best " 
may not have been employed by the questioner on that 
occasion ; were it not for the likelihood that those to 
whom he spoke would not have laid much stress upon 
verbal distinctions, one might guess that he said the 
most national, or representative, or inborn, of our poets. 
The value of the incident remains : it was discovered 



His stand' 
i7tg luith 
typical 
A ineri- 
ca7is of hii 
own tiine. 



96 



JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 



English 
opinion: 
" Pall ' 
Mall Ga- 
zette,'''' 
Jan. 30, 
1882. 



How far a 

national 
^oeU 



'See pp, 5- 
10. 



that Whittier most nearly satisfied the various poetic 
needs of the typical, resolute Americans, men of his 
own historic generation, who composed that assem- 
blage. 

With this may be considered the fact that it is the 
habit of compilers and brief reviewers, whose work is 
that of generalization, to speak of him as a "thor- 
oughly American " poet. An English critic, in a no- 
tice marked by comprehension of our home-spirit, and 
with the honest effort of a delicate mind to get at 
the secret of Whittier's unstudied verse, and gain the 
best that can be gained from it, finds him to be the 
" most national " of our writers, and the most charac- 
teristic through his extraordinary fluency, narrow ex- 
perience, and wide sympathy, — language which im- 
plies a not unfriendly recognition of traits which have 
been thought to be American, — loquacity, provincial- 
ism, and generosity of heart. 

In sentiments thus spoken and written there is a 
good deal of significance. But the words of the for- 
eign verdict cannot be taken precisely as they stand. 
Has there been a time, as yet, when any writer could 
be thoroughly American ? What is the meaning of the 
phrase, — the most limited meaning which a citizen, 
true to our notion of this country's future, will enter- 
tain for a moment.? Assuredly not a quality which 
is collegiate, like Longfellow's, or of a section, like 
Whittier's, or of a special and cultured class, which 
alone can enjoy Whitman's sturdy attempt to create a 
new song for the people before the accepted and ac- 
cepting time. During the period of these men Amer- 
ica scarcely has been more homogeneous in popular 
characteristics than in climate and topography. I have 
discussed the perplexing topic of our nationalism, and 
am willing to believe that these States are blending 



NEW ENGLAND'S BARD. 



97 



into a country whose tlistinclions of race and tendency 
will steadily lessen ; but whether such a faith is well 
grounded is still an open question. And whatsoever 
change is to ensue, in the direction of homogeneity, 
will be the counterswing of a vibration whose first im- 
pulse was away from the uniformity of the early colo- 
nies to the broadest divergence consistent with a com- 
mon language and orovernment. At Whittier's time 
this divergence was greater than before, — greater, 
possibly, than it ever can be again. In fact, it is 
partly as a result of this superlative divergence that 
he is called our most national poet. If his song was 
not that of the people at large, it aided to do away 
with something which prevented us from being one 
people ; and it was national in being true to a char- 
acteristic portion of America, — the intense expression 
of its specific and governing ideas. 

The most discriminating precis is that which Mr. 
Parkman contributed at a gathering in honor of the 
Quaker bard. The exact eye of the author of " Fron- 
tenac " saw the poet as he is : " The Poet of New Eng- 
land. His genius drew its nourishment from her soil ; 
his pages are the mirror of her outward nature, and 
the strong utterance of her inward life." The gloss 
of this sentiment belonged to the occasion ; its anal- 
ysis is specifically correct, and this with full recogni- 
tion of Whittier's most famous kinsmen in birth and 
song. The distinction has been well made, that the 
national poet is not ahvays the chief poet of a nation. 
As a poet of New England, Whittier had little com- 
petition from the bookish Longfellow^, except in the 
latter's sincere feeling for the eastern sea and shore, 
and artistic handling of the courtlier legends of the 
province. He certainly found a compeer in Low-ell, 
whose dialect idyls prove that only genius is needed 
7 



Distinc- 
tively, 
the Poet oj 
Ne^v Eng- 
land. 



98 



JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIER. 



A test of 
this state- 
ment. 



to enable a scholar, turned farmer, to extract the rich- 
est products of a soil j and the lyric fervor of Low- 
ell's odes is our most imaginative expression of that 
New England sentiment which has extended itself, an 
ideal influence, with the movement of its inheritors 
to the farthest West. Emerson, on his part, has vol- 
atilized the essence of New England thought into 
wreaths of spiritual beauty. Yet Mr. Parkman, than 
whom no scholar is less given to looseness of expres- 
sion, terms Whittier the poet of New England, as if 
by eminence, and I think with exceeding justice. The 
title is based on apt recognition of evidence that we 
look to the people at large for the substance of na- 
tional or sectional traits. The base, not the peak, of 
the pyramid determines its bearings. There is, to be 
sure, as much human nature in the mansion as in the 
cottage, in the study or drawing-room as in the shop 
and field. But just as we call those genre canvases, 
whereon are painted idyls of the fireside, the roadside, 
and the farm, pictures of " real life," so we find the 
true gauge of popular feeling in songs that are dear 
to the common people and true to their unsophisti- 
cated life and motive. 

Here we again confront the statement that the six 
Eastern States were not and are not America ; not 
the nation, but a section, — the New Englanders seem- 
ing almost a race by themselves. But what a section ! 
And what a people, when we take into account, su- 
peradded to their genuine importance, a self-depen- 
dence ranking with that of the Scots or Gascons ! As 
distinct a people, in their way, as Mr. Cable's Creoles, 
old or new. Go by rail along the Eastern coast, and 
note the nervous, wiry folk that crowd the stations ; 
— their eager talk, their curious scrutiny of ordinary 
persons and incidents, make it easy to believe that the 



New Eng- 
land'' s in- 
fluence 
upon the 
country at 
large. 



HIS DAY AAD GENERATION. 



99 



trail chosen by Sprague for the subject of his didactic 
poem still is a chief motor of New England's progress, 
and not unjustly its attribute by tradition. This hive 
of individuality has sent out swarms, and scattered its 
ideas like pollen throughout the northern belt of our 
States. As far as these have taken hold, modified by 
change and experience, New England stands for the 
nation, and her singer for the national poet. In their 
native, unadulterated form, they pervade the verse of 
Whittier. It is notable that the sons of the Puritans 
should take their songs from a Quaker ; yet how far 
unlike, except in the doctrine of non-resistance, were 
the Puritans and Quakers of Endicott's time ? To me, 
they seem grounded in the same inflexible ethics, and 
alike disposed to supervise the ethics of all mankind. 
Time and culture have tempered the New England 
virtues ; the Eastern frugality, independence, propa- 
gandism, have put on a more attractive aspect; a 
sense of beauty has been developed, — the mental rec- 
ognition of it finally granted to a northern race, who 
still lack the perfect flexibility and grace observable 
wherever that sense comes by nature and directs the 
popular conscience. As for the rural inhabitants of 
New England, less changed by travel and accomplish- 
ments, we know what they were and are, — among 
them none more affectionate, pious, resolute, than 
Whittier, beyond doubt their representative poet. 

He belongs, moreover, — and hence the point of 
the incident first related, — to the group now rapidly 
disappearing, of which Horace Greeley was a conspic- 
uous member, and to an epoch that gave its workers 
little time for over-refinement, Persian apparatus, and 
the cultivation of aesthetics. That ^roup of scarred 
and hardy speakers, journalists, agitators, felt that he 
was of them, and found his song revealing the highest 



A notable 
coHstituenr 
cy. 



\^.oi ^- 



lOO 



JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 



The bard 
of an his- 
toric time. 



purpose of their boisterous, unsentimental careers. 
These men — Uke all men who do not retrograde — • 
had an ideal. This he expressed, in measures that 
moved them, and whose perfection they had no thought 
or faculty of questioning. Many of them came from 
obscure and rural homes, and to read his verse was to 
recall the scent of the clover and apple-bloom, to hear 
again the creak of the well-pole, the rattle of the bars 
in the lane, — the sights and freshness of youth pass- 
ing for a moment, a vision of peace, over their bat- 
tlefield. They needed, also, their own pibroch and 
battle-cry, and this his song rang out ; their determi- 
nation was in it, blended with the tenderness from 
which such men are never wholly free. 

His ultimate reputation, then, will be inseparable 
from that of his section and its class. He may not 
hold it as one of these whose work appeals to all times 
and races, and whose art is so refined as to be the 
model of after-poets. But he was the singer of what 
was not an empty day, and of a section whose move- 
ment became that of a nation, and whose purpose in 
the end was grandly consummated. We already see, 
and the future will see it more clearly, that no party 
ever did a vaster work than his party ; that he, like 
Hampden and Milton, is a character not produced in 
common times ; that no struggle was more momentous 
than that which preceded our Civil War, no question 
ever affected the destinies of a great people more 
vitally than the antislavery issue, as urged by its pro- 
moters. Neither Greece nor Rome, not even England, 
the battle-ground of Anglo-Saxon liberty, has supplied 
a drama of more import than that in which the poets 
and other heroes of our Civil Reformation played theii 
parts. 



THE QUAKER. 



lOI 



II. 

Whittier's origin and early life were auspicious 
for one who was to become a poet of the people. His 
muse shielded him from the relaxing influence of lux- 
ury and superfine culture. These could not reach the 
primitive homestead in the beautiful Merrimack Val- 
ley, five miles out from the market-town of Haverhill, 
where all things were elementary and of the plainest 
cast. The training of the Friends made his boyhood 
still more simple ; otherwise, as I have said, it mat- 
tered little whether he derived from Puritan or Quaker 
sources. Still, it was much, in one respect, to be de- 
scended from Quakers and Huguenots used to suffer 
and be strong for conscience' sake. It placed him 
years in advance of the comfortable Brahmin class, with 
its blunted sense of right and wrong, and, to use 
his own words, turned him " so early away from what 
Roger Williams calls 'the world's great trinity, pleas- 
ure, profit, and honor,' to take side with the poor 
and oppressed." The Puritans conformed to the rule 
of the Old Testament, the Friends to the spirit of 
the New. One has only to read our colonial annals 
to know how the Jews got on under the Mosaic law, 
inasmuch as to the end of the Mather dynasty the 
pandect of Leviticus, in all its terror, was sternly en- 
forced by church and state. The Puritans had two 
gods, Deus and Diabolus ; the Quakers recognized 
the former alone, and chiefly through his incarnation 
as the Prince of Peace. They exercised, however, 
the right of interference with other people's code and 
practice, after a fashion the more intolerable from a 
surrender of the right to establish their own by rope 
and sword, Whittier's Quaker strain, as Frothingham 
has shown, yielded him wholly to the " intellectual pas- 



John 
Greenlea/ 
Whitticr : 
bor7i near 
Haverhill 
Mass., 
Dec. 17, 
1S07. 



The 

Puritans 
and the 
Quakers. 



The f>oet''s 

Qiuiker- 

istn. 



I02 



JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 



YotUh on 
the farm. 



Influence 
qf Bttrns. 



sion " that Transcendentalism aroused, and still keeps 
him obedient to the Inward Light. And it made him 
a poet militant, a crusader whose moral weapons, since 
he must disown the carnal, were keen of edge and 
seldom in their scabbards. The fire of his deep-set 
eyes, wliether betokening, like that of his kinsman 
Webster, the Batchelder blood, or inherited from some 
old Feuillevert, strangely contrasts with the benign 
expression of his mouth, — that firm serenity, which 
by transmitted habitude dwells upon the lips of the 
sons and daughters of peace. 

There was no affectation in the rusticity of his youth. 
It was the real thing, — the neat and saving homeli- 
ness of the Eastern farm. All the belongings of the 
household were not the equivalent of a week's ex- 
penses in a modern city home, yet there was no want 
and nothing out of tone. We see the wooden house 
and barn, set against the background of rugged acres \ 
indoors, still the loom and wheel, and still the Quaker 
mother, dear old toiling one, the incarnation of faith 
and charity, beloved by a loyal, bright-eyed family 
group. There was little to read but the Bible, " Pil- 
grim's Progress," and the weekly newspaper ; no 
schooling but in the district school-house ; nothing to 
learn of the outer world except from the eccentric 
and often picturesque strollers that in those days ped- 
dled, sang, or fiddled from village to village. Yet the 
boy's poetic fancy and native sense of rhythm were 
not inert. He listened eagerly to the provincial tra- 
ditions and legends, a genuine folk-lore, recounted by 
his elders at the fireside ; and he began to put his 
thoughts in numbers at the earliest possible age. A 
great stimulus came in the shape of Burns's poems, 
a cheap volume of which fell into his possession by 
one of those happenings that seem ordained for poeta 



NEWSPAPER LIFE. 



103 



His first printed efforts were an imitation of the dia- 
lect and measures of the Scottish bard, and perhaps 
no copybook could have been more suitable until he 
formed his own hand — a time not long postponed. 
He well might have fancied that in his experience there 
was much in common with that of his master ; that 
he, too, might live to affirm, though surely in words 
less grandiloquent, "The Genius of Poetry found 
me at the plough, and threw her inspiring mantle over 
me." Of our leading poets, he was almost the only 
one who learned Nature by working with her at all 
seasons, under the sky and in the wood and field. So 
much for his boyhood ; his after course was affected 
greatly by the man then coming into notice as a fa- 
natic and agitator, the lion-hearted champion of free- 
dom, long since glorified with the name he gave to 
his first pronunciamento, the Liberator. A piece of 
verse sent by young Whittier to the Newburyport 
" Free Press " led Garrison, its editor, to look up his 
contributor, and to encourage him with praise and 
counsel. From that time we see the poet working up- 
ward in the old-fashioned way. A clever youth need 
not turn gauger in a land of schools and newspapers. 
Whittier's training was supplemented by a year or 
more at the academy, and by a winter's practice as a 
teacher himself, — fulfilling thus the customary Lehr- 
fahre of our village aspirants. In another year we 
find him the conductor of a tariff newspaper in Bos- 
ton. Before his twenty-fifth birthday he had experi- 
enced the vicissitudes of old-time journalism, chang- 
ing from one desk to another, at Haverhill, Boston, 
and Hartford, still pursuing literature, erelong some- 
what known as a poet and sketch-writer, and near the 
close of this period issuing his first book of Legends, 
in prose and verse. At Hartford also he edited, wdth 



First ac- 
quaintance 
with Wil- 
liatn Lloyd 
Garrison. 



See p. 114 



I04 



JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 



Consecra' 
tion to the 
anti-slav- 
ery Strug- 
^le. 



a well-composed preface, the posthumous collection of 
his friend Brainard's poems. 

But the mission of his life now came upon him. 
He received a call. In 1831 Garrison had begun 
" The Liberator." He was Whittier's ally and guide ; 
the ardor of the poet required an heroic purpose, and 
Garrison's crusade was one to which his whole na- 
ture inclined him. It was no personal ambition that 
made him the psalmist of the new movement. His 
verses, crude as they were, had gained favor ; he al- 
ready had a name, and a career was predicted for 
him. He now doomed himself to years of retarda- 
tion and disfavor, and had no reason to foresee the 
honors they would bring him in the end. What he 
tells us is the truth : " For twenty years my name 
would have injured the circulation of any of the lit- 
erary or political journals in the country." During 
this term his imaginative writings were to be "simply 
episodical," something apart from what he says had 
been the main purpose of his life. He was bent 
upon the service which led Samuel May to declare 
that of all our poets he " has, from first to last, done 
most for the abolition of slavery. All my anti-slavery 
brethren, I doubt not, will unite with me to crown 
him as our laureate." Bryant, many years later, 
pointed out that in recent times the road of others 
to literary success had been made smooth by anti- 
slavery opinions, adding that in Whittier's case the 
reverse of this was true ; that he made himself the 
champion of the slave " when to say aught against 
the national curse was to draw upon one's self the 
bitterest hatred, loathing, and contempt of the great 
majority of men throughout the land." Unquestion- 
ably Whittier's ambition, during his novitiate, had 
been to do something as a poet and man of letters. 



THE CAMPAIGN Win I GARRISON. 



lO 



Not that he had learned what few, in fact, at that 
time reahzed, that the highest art aims at creative 
beauty, and that devotion, repose, and calm are es- 
sential to the mastery of an ideal. But he was a 
natural poet, and, if he had not been filled with con- 
victions, might have reached this knowledge as soon 
as others who possessed the lyrical impulse. The 
fact that he made his rarest gift subsidiary to his 
new purpose, in the flush of early reputation, when 
one is most sensitive to popular esteem, has led me 
to dwell a little upon the story of his life, and to 
observe how^ life itself may be made no less inspiring 
than a poem. I would not be misunderstood; we 
measure poetry at its worth, not at the worth of its 
maker. This is the law ; yet in Whittier's record, if 
ever, there is an appeal to the higher law that takes 
note of exceptions. Some of his verse, as a pattern 
for verse hereafter, is not what it might have been 
if he had consecrated himself to poetry as an art ; 
but it is memorably connected with historic times, 
and his rudest shafts of song were shot true and far 
and tipped with flame. This should make it clear 
to foreigners why we entertain for him a measure of 
the feeling with which Hungarians speak of Petofi, 
and Russians of Turgenieff. His songs touched the 
hearts of his people. It was the generation which 
listened in childhood to the Voices of Freedoin that 
fulfilled their prophecies. 

Garrison started his journal with the watchword of 
"unconditional emancipation," and the pledge to be 
" harsh as truth and uncompromising as justice j . . . 
not to retreat a single inch, and to be heard." Whit- 
tier reenforced him with lyre and pen, — though some- 
times the two differed in policy, — and soon was 
writing abolition pamphlets, editing "The Freeman," 



His gift 
subsidiary 

to " the 



" The 
Voices oj 
Freedo/n,'' 
1S49, etc., 
etc. 



Record 
a7id expe- 
rience. 



io6 



JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 



In the 
feld. 



After the 



and active in the thick of the conflict. He was the 
secretary of the first anti-slavery convention, a signer 
of the Declaration of Sentiments, and, at an age 
when bardlings are making sonnets to a mistress's 
eyebrow, he was facing mobs at Plymouth, Boston, 
Philadelphia. After seven or eight years of this 
stormy service, he settled down in quarters at Ames- 
bury, sending out, as ever, his prose and verse to 
forward the cause. But now his humane and fer- 
vent motives were understood even by opponents, 
and the sweetness of his rural lyrics and idyls had 
testified for him as a poet. In 1843 the most eclec- 
tic of publishing houses welcomed him to its list ; the 
rise of poetry had set in, and Longfellow, Emerson, 
Lowell, were gaining a constituency. As he grew in 
favor, attractive editions of his poems appeared, and 
his later volumes came from the press as frequently 
as Longfellow's, •— more than one of them, like 
" Snow -Bound," receiving in this country as warm 
and wide a welcome as those of the Cambridge lau- 
reate. After the war, Garrison — at last crowned with 
honor, and rejoicing in the consummation of his 
work — was seldom heard. Whittier, in his hermit- 
age, the resort of many pilgrims, has steadily re- 
newed his song. While chanting in behalf of every 
patriotic or humane effort of his time, he has been 
the truest singer of our homestead and wayside life, 
and has rendered all the legends of his region into 
familiar verse. The habit of youth has clung to him, 
and he often misses, in his too facile rhyme and 
rhythm, the graces, the studied excellence of modern 
work. But all in all, as we have seen, and more than 
others, he has read the heart of New England, and ex< 
pressed the convictions of New England at her height 
of moral supremacy, — the distinctive enjoyment of 



TECIIXICAL CA RELESS.XESS. 



107 



which, in view of the growtli of the Union, and the 
spread of her broods throughout its territory, may 



not recur again. 



III. 

It would not be fair to test Whittier by the quality 
of his off-hand work. His verse always was auxiliary 
to what he deemed the main business of his life, and 
has varied with the occasions that inspired it. His 
object was not the artist's, to make the occasion serve 
his poem, but directly the reverse. Perhaps his 7idi- 
vete and carelessness more truthfully spoke for his 
constituents than the polish of those bred in seats 
of culture ; many of his stanzas reflect the homeliness 
of a provincial region, and are the spontaneous out- 
come of what poetry there was in it. His feeling 
gained expression in simple speech and the forms 
which came readily. Probably it occurred somewhat 
late to the mind of this pure and duteous enthusiast 
that there is such a thing as duty to one's art, and 
that diffuseness, bad rhymes, and prosaic stanzas are 
alien to it. Nor is it strange that the artistic moral 
sense of a Quaker poet, reared on a New England 
farmstead, at first should be deficient. A careless 
habit, once formed, made it hard for him to master 
the touch that renders a new poem by this or that 
expert a standard, and its appearance an event. His 
ear and voice were naturally fine, as some of his 
early work plainly shows. ''Cassandra Southwick," 
"The New Wife and the Old," and "The Virginia 
Slave Mother " were of an original flavor and up to 
the standards of that day. If he had occupied him- 
self wholly with poetic work, he would have grown 
as steadily as his mos^ successful compeers. But his 



Unstudied 
quality of 
his verse. 



Its defects. 



io8 



JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER, 



Hasty 

iomposi- 

Hon. 



Cp. ''Vic- 
torian Po- 
ets " : pp. 
Lt, 82. 



vocation became that of trumpeter to the impetuous 
reform brigade. He supplied verse on the instant, 
often full of vigor, but often little more than the 
rallying-blast of a passing campaign. We are told 
by May that " from 1832 to the close of our dreadful 
war in 1865, his harp of liberty was never hung up. 
Not an important occasion escaped him. Every sig- 
nificant incident drew from his heart some pertinent 
and often very impressive or rousing verses." It is 
safe to assume that if he had been more discrimi- 
nating, or had cherished the resolve of Longfellow or 
Tennyson to make even conventional pieces artistic, 
many occasions would have escaped him. We see 
again that Art will forego none of its attributes. 
Sincerity and spontaneity are the well-springs of its 
clearest flow ; yet, if dependent on these traits alone, 
it may become cheap and common, and utterly fail 
of permanence. In the time under notice there was 
nothing more likely to confuse the imagination than 
the life of a journalist, especially of a provincial or 
reform editor. The case of Hood, one of the truest 
of poets by nature, has shown us something of the 
dangers that beset a journalist-poet. This Whittier 
emphatically became, though in every way superior 
to the band of temperance, abolition, and partisan 
rhymesters that, like the shadows of his own failings, 
sprang up in his train. He wrote verses very much 
as he wrote editorials, apd they were forcible only 
when he was deeply moved by stirring crises and 
events. Some of his best were tributes to leaders, 
or rebukes of great men fallen. But he was too apt 
to write weak eulogies of obscurer people ; for every 
friend or ally had a claim upon his muse. 

His imperfections were those of his time and class, 
and he was too engrossed with a mission to overcome 



REFORM- VERSE. 



109 



them. He ne\'er learned compression, and still is 
troubled more with fatal tiuency than our other poets 
of equal rank, — by an inability to reject poor stanzas 
and to stop at the right place. Mrs. Browning was 
a prominent sufferer in this respect. The two poets 
were so much alike, with their indifference to method 
and taste, as to suggest the question (especially in 
view of the subaltern reform-verse-makers) whether 
advocates of causes, and other people of great moral 
zeal, are not relatively deficient in artistic conscien- 
tiousness and in what may be called aesthetic recti- 
tude. 

An occasional looseness in matters of fact may be 
forgiven one who writes from impulse. VVe owe 
" Barbara Frietchie " to the glow excited by a news- 
paper report; and the story of '• Skipper Ireson's 
Ride," now challenged, if not true, is too well told to 
be lost. Whittier became, like a mother's careless, 
warm-hearted child, dearer for his very shortcomings. 
But they sometimes mar his bravest outbursts. Slight 
changes would have made that eloquent lyric, "Ran- 
dolph of Roanoke," a perfect one. Feeling himself 
a poet, he sang by ear alone, in a somewhat primitive 
time ; but the finest genius, in music or painting for 
example, with the aid of a commonplace teacher can 
get over more ground in a month than he would cover 
unaided in a year ; since the teacher represents what 
is already discovered and established. There came a 
period when Whittier's verse was composed solely with 
poetic intent, and after a less careless fashion. It is 
chiefly that portion of it, written from i860 onward, 
that has secured him a more than local reputation. 
His ruder rhymes of a day bear witness to an ex- 
perience which none could better illustrate than by 
citing the words of the poet himself : 



The Poets 
of Re/ornu 



Culture an 
aid to gen-' 
ins. 



no 



JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 



Prose 
writings. 



" Mar- 
garet 
Smith's 
Jour^ial^'' 



Whittier's 
poetical 
style, gen- 
ius,, and 
works. 



" Hater of din and riot, 
He lived in days unquiet; 
And, lover of all beauty, 
Trod the hard ways of duty." 

In prose he soon became skilled. His letters often 
are models of epistolary style ; the best articles and 
essays from his pen are written with a true and di- 
rect hand, though rather barren of the epigram and 
original thought which enrich the prose of Lowell, 
Holmes, and Emerson. Margaret SmWfs Journal is 
a charming nuova antica; a trifle thin in plot, but 
such a quaint reproduction of the early colonial pe- 
riod — its people, manners, and discourse — as scarcely 
any other author save Hawthorne, at the date of its 
production, could have given us. 

IV. 

His metrical style, except in certain lyrics of marked 
individuality, is that of our elders who wrote in dif- 
fuse measures, and whose readers favored sentiment 
more than beauty or wit. It is a degree more old- 
fashioned than styles which are so much older as to 
become new by revival ; that is to say, its fashion was 
current within our own recollection and is now pass- 
ing away. Some forms put on a new type with each 
successive period, such as blank-verse and the irreg- 
ular ode-measures in which Lowell, Taylor, and Stod- 
dard have been successful. Whittier uses these rarely, 
and to less advantage than his ballad-verse. He has 
conformed less than any one but Holmes to the 
changes of the day. Imagine him with an etching, 
needle, tracing the deft lines of a triolet or villanellel 
If he could, and would, it would be seen that when 
one leaves a natural vein, the yield, lacking what is 



EARLY POEMS. 



I I I 



characteristic, is superfluous. Even his recent son- 
nets, " Requirement," " Help," etc., are Kttle more 
than fourteen-line homilies. Those who know their 
author find something of him in them, but such ef- 
forts do not reveal him to a new acquaintance. A 
poet's voice must have a distinct quality to be heard 
above the general choir. 

We turn to his early verse, as still acknowledged, 
to see in what direction his first independent step was 
made, and we note an effort to become a true Amer- 
ican poet — to concern himself with the story and 
motive of his own land. For a time it was rather in- 
effective. The author of Mogg Megone and The Bridal 
of Pomacook was on the same trail with the New 
York squadron that sought the red man's path. It 
is queer, at this distance, to see the methods of Scott 
and Coleridge applied to the Indian legendary of 
Maine. Among works of this sort, however, these 
were the best preceding " Hiawatha." Longfellow 
had the tact to perceive that if the savage is not po- 
etical his folk-lore may be made so. The prelude 
to Whittier's " Bridal " is quite modern and natural. 
It contains a suggestive plea that this experiment in 
a home field may not seem amiss even to those who 
are best pleased 

" while wandering in thought, 
Pilgrims of Romance o'er the olden world." 

And, after all, " Mogg " was a planned and sustained 
effort, and full of promise. Its writer's later manage- 
ment of local themes was more to the point. The 
Songs of Labor are American chiefly in topic, — in 
manner they are much like what Mackay or Massey 
might have written, — yet they became popular, and 
their rhetorical flow adapted them to recitation in the 



A whole' 
some in- 
tent. 



" Mogg 

Meg07ie,^^ 

1836. 

" r]ie 
Bridal of 
Pe7ina- 
cooky^ 



" Songs o. 

Labor,"" 

1850. 



I 12 



JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 



Indica- 
tions of his 
• yue bent. 



Our fore- 
most bal- 
ladist. 



country schools. The poet's distinctive touch first 
appears in the legendary ballads which now precede 
the ^' Voices of Freedom " in his late editions. " The 
New Wife and the Old " is almost our best specimen 
of a style that Mrs. Hemans affected, and which Miss 
Ingelow, Mrs. Browning, and others have employed 
more picturesquely. It is a weird legend, musically 
told, and clearly the lyric of a poet. The early 
Quaker pieces are as good, and have all the traits of 
his verse written forty years afterward. His first bal- 
lads give the clew to his genius, and now make it 
apparent that most of his verse may be considered 
without much regard to dates of production. " Cas- 
sandra Southwick," alone, showed where his strength 
lay : of all our poets he is the most natural balladist, 
and Holmes comes next to him. The manner of 
that poem doubtless was suggested by Macaulay's 
" Battle of Ivry," and nothing could better serve the 
purpose. The colonial tone is well maintained. Here 
is a touching picture of the inspired maid's tempta- 
tion to recant, of her endurance, trial, and victory, 
A group, also, of the populace — cloaked citizens, 
grave and cold, hardy sea - captains, and others — 
gathered where 

" on his horse, with Rawson, his cruel clerk, at hand, 
Sat dark and haughty Endicott, the ruler of the land." 

The bigoted priest, a " smiter of the meek," is a 
type that was to reappear in our poet's scornful in- 
dictments of the divines who, within public remem- 
brance, upheld the slavery system under the sanction 
of Noah's curse of Canaan. This ballad is well-pro' 
portioned, and thus escapes the defect of " The Ex- 
iles," which is otherwise a good piece of idiomatic 
verse. 



THE BALLAD 1ST. 



1 I 



On the whole, it is as a balladist that Whittier dis- 
plays a sure metrical instinct. The record of the 
Quakers has always served his muse, from the date 
of "Cassandra Southwick " to the recent production 
of "The Old South," "The King's Missive," and 
" How the Women went from Dover." Neither Ber- 
nard Barton nor Bayard Taylor is so well entitled to 
the epithet of the Quaker Poet. His Quaker strains, 
chanted while the sect is slowly blending with the 
world's people, seem like its swan-song. It is worth 
noting that of the nine American poets discussed in 
these essays, one is still a Friend, and two others, 
Whitman and Taylor, came of Quaker parentage on 
both sides. The strong ballad, " Barclay of Ury," 
would be almost perfect but for the four moralizing 
stanzas at the close. It is annoying to see a fine 
thing lowered, and even in moral effect, by an offence 
against the ethics of art. Whittier's successes prob- 
ably have been scored most often through ballads of 
our eastward tradition and supernaturalism, such as 
those pertaining to witchcraft, — a province which, 
from " Calef in Boston " to " The Witch of Wenham," 
he never has long neglected. Some of his miscella- 
neous ballads are idyllic ; others, in strong relief, 
were inspired by incidents of the War, during which 
our non-combatant sounded more than one blast, like 
that of Roderick, worth a thousand men. His bal- 
lads vary as much in excellence as in kind ; among 
the most noteworthy are " Mary Garvin," " Parson 
Avery," " John Underbill," and that pure bit of mel- 
ody and feeling, the lay of "Marguerite." Yet some 
of the poems which he classes in this department 
properly are eclogues, or slow-moving narratives. He 
handles well a familiar measure ; when aiming at 
something new, as in " The Ranger," he usually is 



Ballads on 
Qtuikcr 
I he Dies. 



Ballads of 
witch- 
craft, 
colonial 
roi7iance, 
etc. 



114 



JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 



" Skipper 
Ire soil's 
Ride.'" 



1847.) 



" The 
Tejit on 
the 

Beach,''' 
1867. 



less at ease, despite the fact that the nonpareil of his 
briefer pieces is thoroughly novel in form and refrain, 
and doubtless chanced to come to him in such wise. 
" Skipper Ireson's Ride " certainly is unique. Dia- 
lect-poems are too often unfaithful or unpoetic Im- 
agination, humor, and dramatic force are found in the 
ballad of the Marblehead skipper's dole, and its move- 
ment is admirable. The culmination is more effec- 
tive than is usual in a piece by Whittier. We have 
the widow of the skipper's victim saying " God has 
touched him! why should we?" — an old dame, whose 
only son has perished, bidding them " Cut the rogue's 
tether and let him run " ; and 

" So, with soft relentings and rude excuse, 
Half scorn, half pity, they cut hira loose, 
And gave him a cloak to hide him in, 
And left him alone with his shame and sin. 
Poor Floyd Ireson, for his hard heart, 
Tarred and feathered and carried in a cart 
By the women of Marblehead ! " 

The change of feeling is indicated by the single word 
" poor." This is only a minor piece, but quantity is 
the plane, and quality the height, of lyrical verse. 
Were it not for two of Collins's briefest poems, where 
would his name be .-^ 

A balladist should be a good reciter of tales. Our 
poet's prose work on The Sup ernatur alls ni of New 
England was devoted to the ghost and witch stories 
of his own neighborhood. In general design his chief 
story-book in verse, The Tent on the Beach, like Long- 
fellow's "Tales of a Wayside Inn," — the first series 
of which it post-dated and did not equal, — follows 
the oft-borrowed method of Boccaccio and Chaucer. 
The home tales of this group are the best, among them 
" The Wreck of Rivermouth " and " Abraham Daven- 



POEMS OF COUNTRY LIFE. 



I I 



Our chief 

bucolic 

poet. 



port." Throw out a ballad or two, and, but for a 
want of even finish, '' The Tent on the Beach " might 
be taken for a portion of Longfellow's extended work. 
As a bucolic poet of his own section, rendering its 
pastoral life and aspect, Whittier surpasses all rivals. 
This is established chiefly by work- that increased, 
after he reached middle age, with a consciousness of 
his lost youth. In some breathing-spell from the 
stress of his reform labors, he longed for the renewal 

of 

" boyhood's painless play, 
Sleep that wakes in laughing day, 
Health that mocks the doctor's rules, 
Knowledge never learned of schools." 



His eye fell upon the Barefoot Boy, and memory 
brought back a time when he too was 

" rich in flowers and trees, 
Humming-birds and honey-bees." 

To rate the country life at its worth, one must have 
parted from it long enough to become a little tired of 
that for which it was exchanged. The best eclogues 
are those which, however simple, have a feeling added 
by the cast of thought. Poets hold Nature dear when 
refined above her. Goldsmith, after years of wander- 
ing ; Burns, wdien too well acquainted with the fickle 
world. The maker of rural verse, moreover, should be 
country-bred, or he will fall short. Unless Nature has 
been his nurse in childhood, he never will read with 
ease the text of her story-book. The distinction be- 
tween artifice and sincerity is involved, Watteau's 
pictures are exquisite in their way, but Millet gave us 
the real thing. Longfellow's rural pieces were done 
by a skilled workman, who could regard his themes 
objectively and put them to good use. Lowell delights 
in outdoor life, and his Yankee studies are perfect ; 



Rural 

verse, and 
its beget- 
ters. 



Ii6 



JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 



Whittier's 

pastoral 

^irit. 



Still, we feel that he is, intellectually and socially, miles 
above the people of the vale. Whittier is of their 
blood, and always the boy-poet of the Essex farm, 
however advanced in years and fame. They are won 
by the sincerity and ingenuousness of his verse, rooted 
in the soil and native as the fern and wild rose of the 
wayside. His brother-poets are more exact : which of 
them would hit upon " Maud " as a typical farm-girl's 
name ? But incongruities are the signs manual of a 
rural bard, as one can discover frorri Burns 's high- 
sounding letters and manifestoes. Whittier himself de- 
spises a sham pastoral. There is good criticism, a 
clear sense of what was needed, in his paper on Rob- 
ert Dinsmore, the old Scotch bard of his childhood. 
He says of rural poetry that "the mere dilettante and 
the amateur ruralist may as well keep their hands off. 
The prize is not for them. He who would success- 
fully strive for it must be himself what he sings, — 
part and parcel of the rural life, . . . one who has 
added to his book-lore the large experience of an ac- 
tive participation in the rugged toil, the hearty amuse- 
ments, the trials and pleasures he describes." I need 
not dwell upon our poet's fidelity to the landscape 
and legends of the Eastern shore and the vales of 
the Piscataqua and Merrimack. Those who criticise 
his pastoral spirit as lacking Bryant's breadth of tone, 
Emerson's penetration, and Thoreau's detail, confess 
that it is honest and that it comes by nature. His 
most vivid pictures are of scenes which lie near his 
heart, and relate to common life — to the love and 
longing, the simple joys and griefs, of his neighbors 
at work and rest and worship. Lyrics such as " Tell- 
ing the Bees," " Maud Muller," and " My Playmate " 
are miniature classics ; of this kind are those which 
confirmed his reputation and still make his volumes 
real household books of song. 



' snow-bound: 



117 



These rustic verses, as we have seen, came like the 
sound of falling waters to jaded men and women. 
Years ago, when Siunv-Boimd was published, I was 
surprised at the warmth of its reception. I must have 
underrated it in every way. It did not interest one 
not long escaped from bounds, to whom the poetry of 
action then was all in all. And in truth such poetry, 
conceived and executed in the spirit of art, is of the 
higher grade. But I now can see my mistake, a purely 
subjective one, and do justice to " Snovv-Bound " as a 
model of its class. Burroughs well avows it to be the 
" most faithful picture of our northern winter that has 
yet been put into poetry." If his discussion had not 
been restricted to " Nature and the Poets," he perhaps 
would have added that this pastoral gives, and once 
for all, an ideal reproduction of the inner life of an old- 
fashioned American rustic home ; not a peasant-home, 
— far above that in refinement and potentialities, — 
but equally simple, frugal, and devout ; a home of 
which no other land has furnished the coadequate type. 

This poem is not rich in couplets to be quoted for 
their points of phrase and thought. Point, decoration, 
and other features of modern verse are scarcely char- 
acteristic of Whittier. In " Snow-Bound " he chose 
the best subject within his own experience, and he 
made the most of it. Taken as a whole, it is his most 
complete production, and a worthy successor to " The 
Deserted Village" and "The Cotter's Saturday Night." 
Here is that air which writers of quality so often fail to 
capture. " Hermann and Dorothea," " Enoch Arden," 
even " Evangeline," memorable for beauty of another 
kind, leave the impression that each of their authors 
said, as Virgil must have said, *' And now I will com- 
pose an idyl." Whittier found his idyl already pic- 
tured for him by the camera of his own heart. It is a 



" Sncnv- 
Bound. A 

Idyir 
1866. 



AmongtJie 

poems of 
its class. 



ii8 



JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER, 



Uealisnu 



work that can be praised, when measured by others of 
the sort, as heartily as we praise the " Biglow Papers " 
or ''' EvangeUne," and one that ranks next to them as 
an American poem. This " Winter Idyl " is honestly 
named. Under the title, however, is a passage from 
Cornelius Agrippa on the " Fire of Wood," followed 
by Emerson's matchless heralding of the snow-stormo 
Devices of this kind add to the effect of such a poem^ 
only, as " The Ancient Mariner." The texts are need- 
less at the outset of a work whose lovely and unlit- 
erary cast is sufficient in itself. From the key struck 
at the opening to the tender fall at the close, there 
is a sense of proportion, an adequacy and yet a re- 
straint, not always observed in Whittier. This is a 
sustained performance that conforms to the maxim 7ie 
quid nimis. Its genuineness is proved by a severe test, 
the concord with which imaginative passages glide 
into homely, realistic verse : 

" The wind blew east : we heard the roar 
Of Ocean on his wintry shore, 
And felt the strong pulse throbbing there 
Beat with low rhythm our inland air. 

*' Meanwhile we did our nightly chores, — 
Brought in the wood from out of doors, 
Littered the stalls, and from the mows 
Raked down the herd's-grass for the cows ; 
Heard the horse whinnying for his corn ; 
And, sharply clashing horn on horn, 
Impatient down the stanchion rows 
The cattle shake their walnut bows." 

The gray day darkens to 

" A night made hoary with the swarm 
And whirl-dance of the blinding storm; 

The white drift piled the window-frame, 
And through the glass the clothes-line posts 
Looked in like tall and sheeted ghosts." 



A DOWN-EAST TENIERS. 



119 



The poet's child-vision makes this fancy natural and Famy. 
not grotesque. The whole transfiguration is recalled 

" The old familiar sights of ours 
Took marvellous shapes ; strange domes and towers 
Rose up where sty or corn-crib stood, 
Or garden-wall, or belt of wood ; 

The bridle-post an old man sat 

With loose-flung coat and high cocked hat ; 

The well-curb had a Chinese roof ; 

And even the long sweep, high aloof, 

In its slant splendor, seemed to tell 

Of Pisa's leaning miracle." 



Imaginative touches follow : 

*' The shrieking of the mindless wind. 
The moaning tree-boughs swaying blind. 
And on the glass the unmeaning beat 
Of ghostly finger-tips of sleet. 

From the crest 
Of wooded knolls that ridged the west. 
The sun, a snow-blown traveller, sank 
From sight beneath the smothering bank." 

The building and lighting of the wood-fire, the hov- 
ering family group that 

" watched the first red blaze appear. 
Heard the sharp crackle, caught the gleam 
On whitewashed wall and sagging beam," 

the rude-furnished room thus glorified and transformed, 

while even 

" The cat's dark silhouette on the wall 
A couchant tiger's seemed to fall," — 

all this is an interior painted by our Merrimack Te- 
niers. His hand grows free in artless delineations of 
each sharer of the charmed blockade : the father, with 
his stories of woodcraft and adventure ; the Quaker 
mother rehearsing tales from Sewell and Chalkley 



Ttnngina- 
Hon. 



A graphic 
interior. 



I20 



JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER, 



The poefs 

master- 

idece. 



" of faith fire-winged by martyrdom " ; then a foil to 

these, the unlettered uncle " rich in lore of fields and 

brooks," 

"A simple, guileless, childlike man, 
Content to live where life began " ; 

the maiden aunt j the elder sister, full of self - sacri* 
fice, a true New England girl ; lastly, the " youngest 
and dearest," seated on the braided mat, 

" Lifting her large, sweet, asking eyes." 

The guests are no less vividly portrayed. The school- 
master, distinct as Goldsmith's, is of an original type. 
The group is completed, with an instinct for color and 
contrast, by the introduction of a dramatic figure, the 
half-tropical, prophetic woman, who was born to startle, 

" on her desert throne, 
The crazy Queen of Lebanon 
With claims fantastic as her own." 

The poem returns to its theme, and records the days 
of farm-house life during the chill embargo of the 

snow, until 

"a week had passed 
Since the great world was heard from last." 

But the treading ox6n break out the highways, the 
rustic carnival of sledding and sleighing is at hand, 

" Wide swung again our ice-locked door, 
And all the world was ours once more." 

From the subject thus chosen and pursued, an un- 
adventured theme before, our poet has made his mas- 
terpiece. Its readers afterward loved to hear his voice, 
whether at its best or otherwise ; and the more sa 
for his pleased and assured reflection, 

" And thanks untraced to lips unknown 
Shall greet me like the odors blown 
From unseen meadows newly mown." 



ANTI-SLAVERY LYRICS. 



121 



A claim that he has found and preserved in fit and 
winning verse the poetic aspect of his own section can 
be grounded safely on this idyl. We return from the 
work in which his taste is most effectual to that in- 
spired by his life-long convictions. It is in this that 
the faults heretofore noted are most common, but here 
also his natural force is at its height, and results from 
what is lacking in some of his group — the element 
of passion. The verse of his period, especially the 
New England verse, is barren enough of this. For 
what there was, and is, of love-poetry we must look 
south of the region where poets are either too fortunate 
or too self-controlled to die because a woman 's fair. 
The song of the Quaker bard is ahnost virginal, in so 
far as what we term the master-passion is concerned. 
Its passion comes from the purpose that heated his 
soul and both strengthened and impeded lyrical expres- 
sion. Active service in any strife, even the most hu- 
mane, is unrest, and therefore hostile to the perfectixDn 
of art. But the conflict often engenders in its cloud 
the flash of eloquence and song. Three-fourths of 
Whittier's anti-slavery lyrics are clearly effusions of the 
hour j their force was temporal rather than poetic. 
There are music and pathos in " The Virginia Slave 
Mother," and "The Slave-Ships" is lurid and gro- 
tesque enough to have furnished Turner with his theme. 
The poet's deep-voiced scorn and invective rendered 
his anti-slavery verse a very different thing from Long- 
fellow's, and made the hearer sure of his " effectual 
calling." Even rhetoric becomes the outburst of true 
passion in such lines as these upon '' Elliott " : — 

" Hands off ! thou tithe-fat plunderer ! play 
No trick of priestcraft here ! 
Back, puny lordling ! darest thou lay 
A hand on Elliott's bier ? " 



The pas- 
sion of a 
fiery 
Jteart. 



122 



JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 



Personal 
lyrics. 



'^Icha- 



A little of this, however, goes quite far enough in 
poetry. As a writer of personal tributes, whether 
paeans or monodies, the reform bard, with his peculiar 
faculty of characterization, has been happily gifted. 
Scarcely one of these that might not be retouched to 
advantage, but they are many and various and strik- 
ing. John Randolph lives for us in the just balanc- 
ing, the masterly and sympathetic portraiture, of Whit- 
tier's fine elegy. Channing, Elliott, Pius IX., Foster, 
Rantoul, Kossuth, Sumner, Garibaldi, — all these his- 
toric personages are idealized by this poet, and haloed 
with their spiritual worth ; his tributes are a lyrical 
commentary, from the minstrel's point of view, upon 
an epoch now gone by. The wreath his aged hands 
have laid upon the tomb of Garrison is a beautiful 
and consecrated offering. One of his memorable im- 
provisations was " Ichabod," the lament for Webster's 
defection and fall, — a tragical subject handled with 
lyric power. In after years, his passion tempered by 
the flood of time, he breathes a tenderer regret in 
" The Lost Occasion " : — 

" Thou shouldst have lived to feel below 
Thy feet Disunion's fierce upthrow, — 
The late-sprung mine that underlaid 
Thy sad concessions vainly made. 

Ah, cruel fate, that closed to thee, 
O sleeper by the Northern sea, 
The gates of opportunity ! " 

But the conception of " Ichabod " is most impressive ; 
those darkening lines were graven too deeply for ob- 
literation. In thought we still picture the deserted 
leader, the shadow gathering about his " august head," 
while he reads such words as these : — 

" All else is gone ; from those great eyes 
The soul has fled : 



RELIGIO US EXAL TA 77 ON. 



123 



When faith is lost, when honor dies, 
The man is dead. 

" Then, pay the reverence of old days 
To his dead fame ; 
Walk backward, with averted gaze, 
And hide the shame ! " 

Among our briefer poems on topics of dramatic gen- 
eral interest, I recall but one which equals this in ef- 
fect, — and that, coming from a hand less familiar 
than Whittier's, is now almost unknown. I refer to 
the '' Lines on a Great Man Fallen," written by Wil- 
liam W. Lord, after the final defeat of Clay, and in 
scorn of the popular judgment that to be defeated 
is to fall. The merit of this eloquent piece has been 
strangely overlooked by the makers of our literary 
compilations. 

It is matter of history that our strictest clerical 
monitors, during the early struggle for abolition, op- 
posed agitation of the slavery question, and often with 
a rancor that Holy Willie might envy. Not even this 
one-sided odium theologiaim could long debar Whit- 
tier from the respect of the church-going classes, for he 
is the most religious of secular poets, and there is no 
gainsaying to a believer the virtues of one who guides 
his course by the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. 
A worshipful spirit, a savor " whose fragrance smells to 
heaven," breathes from these pages of the Preacher- 
Poet's song. The devotional bent of our ancestors 
was the inheritance of his generation. Domesticity, 
patriotism, and religion were, and probably still are, 
American characteristics often determining an author's 
success or failure. A reverent feeling, emancipated 
from dogma and imbued with grace, underlies the 
wholesome morality ot our national poets. No countr}^ 
has possessed a group, equal in talent, that has pre- 



Deep relig- 
iotcs feel- 
ing- 



Morality 
of Avter- 
ican verse. 



124 



JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 



A poet tnil- 
ita?ii and 
ininis- 
irant. 



sented more willingly whatsoever things are pure, 
lovely, and of good report. There is scientific value in 
an influence, during a race's formative period, so clar- 
ifying to the general conscience. We have no proof 
that the unmorality of a people like the French, with 
exquisite resources at command, can evolve an art or 
literature greater than in the end may result from the 
virile chastity of the Saxon mind. Whittier is the Gal- 
ahad of modern poets, not emasculate, but vigorous 
and pure ; he has borne Christian's shield of faith and 
sword of the Spirit. His steadfast insistence upon 
the primitive conception of Christ as the ransomer of 
the oppressed had an effect, stronger than argument or 
partisanship, upon the religiously inclined ; and of his 
lyrics, more than of those by his fellow-poets, it could 
be averred that the songs of a people go before the 
laws. Undoubtedly a flavor smacking of the caucus, 
the jubilee, and other adjuvants of " the cause " is 
found in some of his polemic strains ; but again they 
are like the trumpeting of passing squadrons, or the 
muffled drum - beat for ciiieftains fallen in the fray. 
The courage that endures the imputation of coward- 
ice, as in " Barclay of Ury," the suffering of man for 
man, the cry of the human, never fail to move him. 
He celebrates all brave deeds and acts of renuncia- 
tion. The heroism of martyrs and resistants, of the 
Huguenots, the Vaudois, the Quakers, the English re- 
formers, serves him for many a song and ballad. At 
every pause after some new devotion, after some su- 
preme offering by one of his comrades, it was the 
voice of Whittier that sang the paean and the requiem. 
His cry, — - 

" Thou hast fallen in thine armor. 
Thou martyr of the Lord ! " 

compares with Turgenieff's thought of the Russian 



PRAYER AXD PRAISE. 



125 



maiden crossing the threshold of dishonor and mar- 
tyrdom, the crowd crying " Fool ! " without, while from 
within and above a rapturous voice utters the words, 
"Thou saint!" His sympathy flows to prisoners, 
emancipationists, throughout the world ; and in " The 
May-Flower " he has a lurking kindness even for the 
Puritans, — but of the sort that Burns extends to 
Auld Hornie. This compassion reaches a climax in 
the lyric of the two angels who are commissioned to 
ransom hell itself. The injunction to beware of the 
man of one book applies to the poet whose Bible was 
interpreted for him by a Quaker mother. Its letter 
rarely is absent from his verse, and its spirit never. 
His hymns, than which he composes nothing more 
spontaneously, are so many acts of faith. The eman- 
cipationists certainly fought with the sword in one 
hand and the Bible in the other, — and Whittier's 
hymns were on their lips. The time came when these 
were no longer of hope, but of thanksgiving. Often 
his sacred numbers, such as the " Invocation," hav^e 
a sonorous effect and positive strength of feeling. It 
was by the common choice of our poets that he wrote 
the "Centennial Hymn"; no one else w^ould venture 
where the priest of song alone should go. The com- 
position begins imposingly : — 



" Our fathers' God ! from out whose hand 
The centuries fall like grains of sand " ; 

and it is difficult to see how a poem for sacred music, 
or for such an occasion, could be more adequately 
wrought. 

His occasional and personal pieces reveal his tran- 
scendental habit of thought. We find him imagining 
the after-life of the good, the gifted, the maligned. 
The actuality of his conceptions is impressive : — 



Hyrniis of 
prayer 
nfid 
praise. 



Trajtscett' 

de7ital 

spirit. 



126 



JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 



/4« abid- 
ing mood. 



" I have friends in spirit-land ; 
Not shadows in a shadowy band, 

Not others, but themselves, are they." 

The change is only one from twilight into dawn : — 

" Thou livest, Fallen ! — not in vain 
Hath thy fine spirit meekly borne 
The burthen of Life's cross of pain." 

And in " Snow- Bound " he thus invokes a sister of 
his youth : — 

" And yet, dear heart, remembering thee, 
Am I not richer than of old t 
Safe in thy immortality. 

What change can reach the wealth I hold ? " 

Whittier's religious mood is far from being super- 
ficial and temporary. It is the life of his genius, out 
of which flow his ideas of earthly and heavenly con- 
tent. In outward observance he is loyal to the sim- 
ple ways of his own sect, and still a frequenter of the 
Meeting, where — 

"from the silence multiplied 
By these still forms on either side, 
The world that time and sense have known 
Falls off and leaves us God alone." 

God should be most, he says, — 

" where man is least ; 
So, where is neither church nor priest, 
And never rag of form or creed 
To clothe the nakedness of need, — 
Where farmer-folk in silence meet, — 
I turn my bell-unsummoned feet." 

He clings in this wise to the formal formlessness of 
the Quakers, as he would cling, doubtless, to the 
usages of any church in which he had been bred, pro- 
vided that its creed rested upon the cardinal doctrines 
of the Master. Channing seemed to him a hero and 



THE INWARD LIGHT. 



127 



saint, with whom he could enter into full commun- 
ion : — 

" No bars of sect or clime were felt, — 

The Babel strife of tongues had ceased, — 
And at one common altar knelt 
The Quaker and the priest." 

With this liberal inclusion of all true worshippers, he 
is so much the more impatient of clerical bigotry. 
" Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites ! " 
has been often on his lips, — sometimes the outbreak 
of downright wrath, — 

" Woe to the priesthood ! woe 
To those whose hire is with the price of blood, — 
Perverting, darkening, changing, as they go, 

The searching truths of God ! " 

at other times varied with grim and humorous con- 
tempt, as in " The Pastoral Letter" and "The Hasch- 
ish " ; and never more effectively than in the vivid and 
stinging ballad of the fugitive slave-girl, captured in 
the house of God, in spite of tearful and defying 
women's eyes, and of the stout hands that rise be- 
tween " the hunter and the flying." Down comes the 
parson, bowing low : — 

" Of course I know your right divine 
To own and work and whip her ; 
Quick, deacon, throw that Polyglot 
Before the wench, and trip her ! " 

The basic justification of Whittier's religious trust 
appears to be the " inward light " vouchsafed to a 
nature in which the prophet and the poet are one. 
This solvent of doubt removes him alike from the 
sadness of Clough and Arnold and the paganism of 
certain other poets- In the striking " Questions of 
Life," a piece which indicates his highest intellectual 
mark and is in affinity with some of Emerson's dis- 



Scorn of 
bigotry. 



The " in^ 

ward 

light:^ 



128 



JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 



Faith, es- 
sential to 
the highest 
art. 



A nterican 
foets, as 
ferson- 
dges. 



course, he fairly confronts his own share of our mod- 
ern doubts ; questioning earth, air, and heaven ; per- 
plexed with the mystery of our alliance to the upper 
and lower worlds ; asking what is this 

" centred self, which feels and is ; 
A cry between the silences." 

He finds no resource but to turn from 

"book and speech of men apart 
To the still witness in my heart." 

His repose must come from the direction in which 
the Concord transcendentalists also have sought for 
it, the soul's temple irradiated by the presence of the 
inward light. I have seen a fervent expression of 
this belief, in a voluntary letter of Whittier's, to a 
poet who had written an ode concerning intuition as 
the refuge of the baffled investigator. In fine, the 
element of faith gives a tone to the whole range of 
his verse, both religious and secular, and more dis- 
tinctively than to the work of any other living poet 
of equal reputation. What he has achieved, then, is 
greatly due to a force which is the one thing needful 
in modern life and art. Faith, of some kind, in things 
as they are or will be, has elevated all great works 
of human creation. The want of it is felt in that in- 
sincere treatment which weakens the builder's, the 
painter's, and the poet's appeal ; since faith leads to 
rapture and that to exaltation, — the passio vera, with- 
out which art gains no hold upon the senses and the 
souls of men. 



V. 

The leaders of our recent poetic movement, with 
the exception of Longfellow, — who, like Tennyson 



COMPARED TO MRS, BROWNING. 



129 



and Browning, devoted himself wholly to ideal work, 
— seem to have figured more distinctively as person- 
ages, in both their lives and writings, than their Eng- 
lish contemporaries. This remark certainly applies to 
Poe, Emerson, Whitman, Holmes, and Lowell, and to 
none more clearly than to the subject of this review. 
His traits, moreover, have begotten a sentiment of 
public affection, which, from its constant manifesta- 
tion, is not to be overlooked in any judgment of his 
career. In recognition of a beautiful character, critics 
have not found it needful to measure this native bard 
with tape and calipers. His service and the spirit of 
it offset the blemishes which it is their wont to con- 
demn in poets whose exploits are merely technical. 
A life is on his written page ; these are the chants of 
a soldier, and anon the hymnal of a saint. Contem- 
porary honor is not the final test, but it has its 
proper bearing, — as in the case of Mrs. Browning, 
whom I have called the most beloved of English poets. 
Whittier's audience has been won by unaffected pic- 
tures of the scenes to which he was bred, by the pu- 
rity of his nature, and even more by the earnestness 
audible in his songs, injurious as it sometimes is to 
their artistic purpose. Like the English sibyl, he has 
obeyed the heavenly vision, and the verse of poets 
who still trust their inspiration has its material, as 
well as spiritual, ebb and flow. 

It must be owned that Goethe's calm distinction 
between the poetry of humanity and that of a high 
ideal is fully illustrated in Whittier's reform-verse. 
Yet even his failings have "leaned to virtue's side." 
Those who gained strength from his music to endure 
defeat and obloquy cherish him with a devotion be- 
yond measure. For his righteous and tender heart 
they would draw him with their own hands, over paths 
9 



Wkittiers 
endearing 
traits. 



Purity and 
zeaL 



Philatf 
thropy. 



I30 



JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 



Pro ariset 
facts. 



Hebraic 
fervor. 



Strewed with lilies, to a shrine of peace and remem- 
brance. They comprehend his purpose — that he has 
'' tried to make the world a little better, ... to awaken 
a love of freedom, justice, and good will," and to have 
his name, like Ben Adhem's, enrolled as of " one that 
loved his fellow-men." In their opinion a grace is 
added to his poetry by the avowal, " I set a higher 
value on my name as appended to the Anti-Slavery 
Declaration of 1833, than on the title-page of any 
book." 

Our eldest living poet, then, is canonized already 
by his people as one who left to silence his personal 
experience, yet entered thoroughly into their joy and 
sorrow ; who has been, like a celibate priest, the con- 
soler of the hearts of others and the keeper of his 
own ; who has best known the work and feeling of 
the humble household, and whose legend manifestly 
is pro aris et focis. He has stood for New England, 
also, in his maintenance of her ancient protest against 
tyranny. He is the veteran of an epoch that can 
never recur; that scarcely can be equalled, however 
significant future periods may seem from the artist's 
point of view. The primitive life, the old struggle for 
liberty, are idealized in his strains. Much of both his 
strength and incompleteness is due to his Hebraic 
nature ; for he is the incarnation of Biblical heroism, 
of the moral energy that breathed alike, through a 
cycle of change from dogma to reason, in Hooker, 
Edwards, Parker, Garrison, and Emerson. In his 
outbursts against oppression and his cries unto the 
Lord, we recognize the prophetic fervor, still nearer 
its height in some of his personal poems, which pop- 
ular instinct long ago attributed to him. Not only of 
Ezekiel, but also of himself, he chanted in that early 
time of anointment and consecration : •— 



'AD vatem: 



I ^I 



" The burden of a prophet's power 
Fell on me -n that fearful hour ; 
From off unutterable woes 
The curtain of the future rose; 
I saw far down the coming time 
The fiery chastisement of crime ; 
With noise of mingling hosts, and jar 
Of falling towers and shouts of war, 
I saw the nations rise and fall, 
Like fire-gleams on my tent's white wall." 

Oliver Johnson's tribute, a complement to Park- 
man's, paid honor to " The Prophet Bard of America, 
poet of freedom, humanity, and religion ; whose words 
of holy fire aroused the conscience of a guilty nation, 
and melted the fetters of the slaves." This eulogy 
from a comrade is the sentiment of a multitude in 
whose eyes their bard seems almost transfigured by 
the very words that might be soonest forgotten if pre- 
cious for their poetry alone. I confess to my own 
share of this feeling. It may be that he has thought 
too little of the canons which it is our aim to discover 
and illustrate ; yet it was to him above all that the 
present writer felt moved to dedicate a volume with the 
inscription "Ad Vatem," and to invoke for Whittier 

" the Land that loves thee, her whose child 
Thou art, — and whose uplifted hands thou long 
Hast stayed with song availing like a prayer." 

For surely no aged servant, his eyes having seen in 
good time the Lord's salvation, ever was more en- 
dowed with the love and reverence of a chosen peo- 
ple. They see him resting in the country of Beulah, 
and there solacing himself for a season. From this 
comfortable land, where the air is sweet and pleasant 
(and he is of those who here have " met abundance 
of what they had sought for in all their pilgrimage "), 



The 

Prophet 

Bard. 



''Ad Va- 
tem:'' 



132 



JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 



they are not yet willing to have him seek the Golden 
City of his visions, but would fain adjure him, — 

" And stay thou with us long ! vouchsafe us long 
This brave autumnal presence, ere the hues 
Slow-fading, ere the quaver of thy voice, 
The twilight of thine eye, move men to ask 
Where hides the chariot, — in what sunset vale. 
Beyond thy chosen river, champ the steeds 
That wait to bear thee skyward." 



CHAPTER V. 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 



I. 

THE grasses had scarcely taken root on Emer- 
son's grave among the pines when a discussion 
of his genius began, to which so many have contrib- 
uted, that we already are asking Lowell's question 
concerning Shakespeare, — Can anything new be said 
of him ? One thing, it seems to me, may be said, at 
least in a new way and as a clew to his work as a 
poet. While, of all his brotherhood, he is the radi- 
ant exemplar of his own statement, that in spirit " the 
true poet and the true philosopher are one," never- 
theless, of all verse his own shows most clearly that 
the Method of the poet not only is not one with that 
of the philosopher, but is in fact directly opposed to 
it. The poet, as an artist, does not move in the di- 
rection which was Emerson's by instinct and selec- 
tion. The Ideal philosophy scrutinizes every phase 
of Nature to find the originating sense, the universal 
soul, the pure identity ; it follows Nature's trails to 
their common beginning, inverting her process of evo- 
lution, working back from infinite variety to the pri- 
mal unity. This, too, is the spirit of the poet, — to 
find the soul of things. But in method he is an ar- 
tist : his poetry is an art that imitates Nature's own 
habit. He works from unity to countless results and 
formations, from the pure thought to visible symbols, 



A clcwifi 
his work 
as a poet. 



Differetice 
between 
artistic 
and philo- 
sophic pra 
cesses. 



134 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 



A combi- 
tuition. 



A 



Ideal prose 
»nd verse. 



His nat- 
ural disci- 
ples. 



from the ideal to the concrete. As a poet, Emerson 
found himself in a state, not of distraction, but often 
of indecision, between the methods of philosophy and 
art. To bear this in mind is to account more read- 
ily for the peculiar beauties and deficiencies of his 
verse, — ■ and thus to accept it as it is, and not with- 
out some understanding of its value. 

Hermann Grimm recurs to the dispute whether our 
sage was a poet, a philosopher, or a prophet. The 
fact is that he v*^as born with certain notes of song ; 
he had the poet's eye and ear, and was a poet just 
so far as, being a philosopher, he accepted poetry as 
the expression of thought in its rare and prophetic 
moods, and just so far as, in exquisite moments, he 
had the mastery of this form of expression. 

Emerson's prose is full of poetry, and his poems 
are light and air. But this statement, like so many 
of his own, gives only one side of a truth. His prose 
is just as full of every-day sense and wisdom ; and 
something different from prose, however sublunary 
and imaginative, is needed to constitute a poem. 
His verse, often diamond-like in contrast with the 
feldspar of others, at times is ill-cut and beclouded. 
His prose, then, is that of a wise man, plus a poet ; 
and his verse, by turns, light and twilight, air and 
vapor. Yet we never feel, as in reading Wordsworth, 
that certain of his measures are wholly prosaic. He 
was so careless of ordinary standards, that few of his 
own craft have held his verse at its worth. It is said 
that his influence was chiefly, like that of Socrates, 
upon the sensitive and young, and such is the case 
with all fresh influences ; but I take it that those who 
have fairly assimilated Emerson's poetry in their youth 
have been not so much born poets as born thinkers 
of a poetic cast. It is inevitable, and partakes of 



POET AND THINKER. 



growth by exercise, that poets in youth should value 
a master's sound and color and form, rather tlian his 
priceless thought. They are drawn to the latter by 
the former, or not at all. Yet when poets, even in 
this day of refinement, have served their technical ap- 
prenticeship, the depth and frequent splendor of Em- 
erson's verse grow upon them. They half suspect 
that he had the finest touch of all when he chose to 
apply it. It becomes a question whether his discords 
are those of an undeveloped artist, or the sudden 
craft of one who knows all art and can afford to be 
on easy terms with it. I think there is evidence on 
both sides; — that he had seasons when feeling and 
expression were in circuit, and others when the wires 
were down, and that he was as apt to attempt to 
send a message at one time as at the other. But he 
suggested the subtilty and swiftness of the soul's 
reach, even when he failed to sustain it. 

I have said that of two poets, otherwise equal, the 
one who acquires the broadest knowledge will draw 
ahead of him who only studies his art, and the poet 
who thinks most broadly and deeply will draw ahead 
of all. There can be little doubt of Emerson as a 
thinker, or as a poet for thinkers satisfied with a deep 
but abstract and not too varied range. Yet he did 
not use his breadth of culture and thought to diver- 
sify the purpose, form, symbolism, of his poems. 
They are mostly in one key. They teach but one 
lesson ; that, to be sure, is the first and greatest of 
all, but they fail to present it, after Nature's method, 
in many forms of living and beautiful interest, — to 
exemplify it in action, and thus bring it within uni- 
versal sympathy. That this should be so was, I say, 
inevitable from the field of Emerson's research, — 
that of pure rather than of applied philosophy. Thus 



A t times 
the finest 
to Itch of 
all. 



A single 
thought 
conveyed^ 
but thai t/u 
greatest. 



136 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 



Essential- 
ly a poet. 



A n apt 
■paradox. 



far, however, he represents Thought in any adjust- 
ment of our poetic group, and furthermore, — his 
thought being independent and emancipatory, — the 
American conflict with superstition, witli servihty to 
inherited usage and opinion. 

We shall see that he had himself a noble and com- 
prehensive ideal of what a typical poet should be, 
and was aware that his own song fell short of it. 
Still, he called himself a poet, and the consent of the 
best minds has sustained him in his judgment. His 
prose alone, as Lowell said, showed that he was es- 
sentially a poet j another with reason declared of his 
spoken essays that they were " not so much lectures 
as grave didactic poems, theogonies," adorned with 
"odes" and "eclogues." Thirty years later a cool 
and subtile writer looks back to find them the " most 
poetical, the most beautiful, productions of the Amer- 
ican mind." For once the arbiters agree, except in 
a question akin to the dispute whether all things con- 
sist solely of spirit or solely of matter. Common 
opinion justified Mr. Sanborn's fine paradox that, in- 
stead of its being settled that Emerson could not 
write poetry, it was settled that he could write noth- 
ing else. We know^ his distaste for convention, his 
mistrust of " tinkle " and " efficacious rhymes." But 
his gift lifted him above his will ; even while throw- 
ing out his grapnel, clinging to prose as the firm 
ground of his work, he rose involuntarily and with 
music. And it well may be that at times he wrote 
verse as an avowal of his nativity, and like a noble 
privileged to use the language of the court. Cer- 
tainly he did not restrict himself to the poet's calling 
with the loyalty of Tennyson and Longfellow. In 
verse, however careful of his phrase, he was some. 
Ihing of a rhapsodist, not apt to gloss his revelations 



THE GREAT MAN'S IXTELLECT. 



"^11 



and exhortini;s with the nice perfection of those oth- 
ers. He must be reviewed as one whose verse and 
parable and prophecy alike were means to an end, — 
that end not art, but the enfranchisement and stimu- 
lation of his people and his time. When Longfellow, 
the poet of graceful art and of sympathy as tender 
as his voice, took his departure, there went up a cry 
as from a sense of fireside loss. People everywhere 
dwelt upon the story of his life and recalled his folk- 
songs. Emerson glided away almost unperceived un- 
der the shadow of the popular bereavement. But 
soon, and still multiplying from the highest sources, 
tributes to his genius began to appear, — searching, 
studying, expounding him, — as when a grand nature, 
an originating force, has ceased to labor for us. This 
is the best of fame : to impress the selected minds, 
which redistribute the effect in steadfast circles of ex- 
tension. More than his associates, Emerson achieved 
this fame. He had the great man's intellect, which, 
according to Landor, " puts in motion the intellect of 
others." He was, besides, so rare a personage, that 
one who seeks to examine his writings apart from the 
facts and conduct of his life needs must wander off 
in contemplation of the man himself. Yet anything 
that others can wTite of him is poor indeed beside a 
collect of his own golden sayings. He felt his work 
to be its own and best interpreter, and of recent au- 
thors who have justly held this feeling he doubtless 
was the chief. 

11. 

His writings, then, are the key to his biography — 
the scroll of a life which, as for essential matter, and 
as he said of Plato's, was chiefly "interior," To 
quote his own language further, " Great geniuses have 



His office. 



Order of 
ijitcllect. 



R. W. E.l 
born 171 
DostoH, 
J/uss., 
May 25, 
1S03. 



138 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 



A ncestry. 



Training. 



Inflitence 
i>f Chan- 

•iting^ 



Retire- 
tnent from 
the pulpit. 



the shortest biographies." Among the external points 
of significance in Emerson's Story are those derived 
from his ancestral strain, for he was of pure and 
even gentle English blood, " through eight genera- 
tions of cultured, conscientious, and practical minis- 
ters." He himself, as we know, assumed the profes- 
sion of his father and forefathers, and for a time 
was a Unitarian preacher in Boston ; this, after the 
stated courses at Harvard, where he read and wrote 
philosophy, nor failed^ to cultivate the Muse - — for 
whose art he had shown a rare aptness even in child- 
hood. The office and honors of the Class Poet fell 
to him, as to Lowell in after years. In letters he h^d 
Everett, Ticknor, and Edward Channing for instruc- 
tors. In theology he was deeply influenced by Chan- 
ning, the divine, — the true founder, through the work 
of Emerson and lesser pupils, of our liberal religious 
structure. Emerson projected tlie lines of the master 
so far beyond their first draft that he was unable 
long to remain within the Unitarian limits of that 
day. Some one has cleverly said that his verse, 
" Good-bye, proud world ! " came from one whose 
future gave no cause for epigrams like that of Ma- 
dame de Sevigne on Cardinal de Retz — of whom she 
wrote that he pretended to retire from a world which 
he saw was retiring from him. The separation from 
the church, and the retreat to Concord, were the be- 
ginning of Emerson's long career as poet, lecturer, 
essayist, thinker and inspirer. The details of his 
social, domestic, and civic relations are all upon rec- 
ord. Nothing could be more seemly than his life- 
long abode in the New England village of Concord, 
the home of his line, the birth-place of our liberties ; 
and it became, largely through his presence, the 



THE ACADEME. 



139 



source of our most resultful thought. Here he 
blended, in his speech and action, the culture of the 
university, nigh at hand, with the shrewd prudence 
of the local neighborhood, as became a poet and 
sage imbued with patriotism, morals, and the wisdom 
of practical life. Here, though crossing the ocean 
more than once, and inspecting other lands with the 
regard that sees for once and all, he otherwise exem- 
plified during half a century his own conception of 
the clear spirit — that needs not to go afar upon its 
quests, because it vibrates boundlessly, and includes 
all things within reach and ken. For the rest, the 
life of Emerson appertained to the household, the 
library, the walk, the talk with all sorts and con- 
ditions of men, communion with rare natures, the 
proper part in local and national movement. As a 
lecturer, his range was the country at large, but the 
group that drew about him made Concord a modern 
Academe. Unconsciously he idealized them all with 
the halo of his own attributes. To him they all were 
of the breed so exquisitely characterized in his ref- 
erence to Margaret Fuller's " Friends." " I remem- 
ber," he says, " these persons as a fair, commanding 
troop, every one of them adorned by some splendor 
-of beauty, of grace, of talent, or of character, and 
comprising in their band persons wdio have since dis- 
closed sterling worth and elevated aims in the conduct 
of life." Thus year after year a tide, that ceases not 
with the death of him who mainly attracted it, has set 
toward Concord, — a movement of pilgrims craving 
spiritual exaltation and the interplay of mind with 
mind. The poet's moral and intellectual experiences 
are revealed in discourses, always beginning with the 
memorable sermon on the Lord's Supper, which pre- 



A/ter-life 
atui 



Pjcpils and 
associates. 



Concord. 



Sermon ok 
the CofH- 
7nunion, 
1832. 



140 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 



Essay on 

^'Nature,'' 

1836. 



The tran- 
icendetital 
moveme7tt. 



His per- 
lotial traits 
dftd bear- 
hig. 



figured his emancipation from dogma, -^ and the es- 
say on Nature, wherein he appUed a new vision to 
the world about us. These were the Alpha of his 
conviction and insight \ his after-speech followed con- 
sistently and surely, "as the night the day." He 
created his own audience, whose demand for his 
thought grew by what it fed on, beginning in a sec- 
tion, and spreading not only through a country but 
over many lands. If it is true that " he was not the 
prince of transcendentalists but the prince of ideal- 
ists," the history of New England transcendentalism 
is no less a corollary to the problem of Emerson's 
life. 

Our starry memories of the places and people that 
once knew Emerson radiate always from one centre 
— the presence of the sage himself. Many pupils, 
catching something of his own sure and precise art 
of delineation, have drawn his image for us, dwelling 
upon the sinewy bending figure, the shining and ex- 
pectant face, the union of masculinity and sweetness 
in his bearing. His "full body tone" is recalled, 
" full and sweet rather than sonorous, yet flexible, 
and haunted by many modulations." Persuasion sat 
upon his lips. The epithet " sun-accustomed " is 
applied to Emerson's piercing eyes by one, a woman 
and a poet, who marked the aquiline effect of his 
noble profile. I, too, remember him in this wise, 
and as the most serene of men : one whose repose, 
whose tranquillity, was not the contentment of an 
idler housed in worldly comforts, but the token of 
spiritual adjustment to all the correspondences of 
life ; as the bravest and most deferential, the proud- 



1 Definitely set forth in his Address before the Senior Class 
in Divinity College, Cambridge, July 15, 1838. 



HIS PHILOSOPHY. 



141 



est in self-respect, yet recognizing in deep humility 
the supremacy of universal law. No man so recep- 
tive, and none with so plain and absolute a reser- 
vation of his own ground. Even in the shadow and 
silence of his closing years, he bore the mien of one 
assured that 

" the gods reclaim not from the seer 
Their gift, although he ceases here to sing. 
And, like the antique sage, a covering 
Draws round his head, knowing what change is near." 



III. 

It is not my province to take part in the discus- 
sion of Emerson's philosophy, his system or lack of 
system. Some notion of this, however, must affect 
our thoughts of him as a poet, since of all moderns 
he most nearly fulfilled Wordsworth's inspired pre- 
diction, uttered sixty years ago, of the approaching 
union of the poet and the philosopher. He deemed 
the higher ofifi.ce that of the poet, — of him who quaffs 
the brook that flows fast by the oracles, — yet doubt- 
less thought himself not so well endowed with melody 
and passion that his teaching should be subordinate 
to his song. But the latter was always the flower- 
ing of his philosophic thought, and it is essential to 
keep in view the basis of that pure reflection. He 
looked upon Nature as pregnant with Soul; for him 
the Spirit always moved upon the face of the waters. 
The incomprehensible plan was perfect : whatever is, 
is right. Thus far he knew, and was an optimist with 
reverent intent. It was in vain to ask him to assert 
what he did not know, to avow a creed founded upon 
his hopes. If a theist, with his intuition of an all- 
pervading life, he no less felt himself a portion of 



Died at 
Concord, 
Mass. , 
April 27, 
1882. 



Emersofi's 
philosophy. 



OptititisTtz. 



142 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 



Reverence 

without 

dogma. 



A n idealist 
and eclec- 
tic. 



Morals. 



Life takeji 
at its full 
worth. 



that life, and the sense of omnipresence was so clearly 
the dominant sense of its attributes, that to call him 
a theist rather than a pantheist is simply a dispute 
about terms ; to pronounce him a Christian theist is 
to go beyond his own testimony. Such a writer must 
be judged by the concurrence of his books ; they are 
his record, and the parole evidence of no associate 
can weigh against his written manifest for an instant. 
His writings assure us that he accepted all bibles 
and creeds for what good there was in them. One 
thing for him was "certain": "Religions are ob- 
solete when lives do not proceed from them." He 
saw that " unlovely, nay frightful, is the solitude of 
the soul which is without God in the world " ; but 
the creeds and dogmas of anthropomorphic theology 
were merely germinal. " Man," thus far, has " made 
all religions, and will yet make new and even higher 
faiths." 

Emerson, a man of our time, while a transcenden- 
talist, looking inward rather than to books for his 
wisdom, studied well the past, and earlier sages were 
the faculty of his school. A latter-day eclectic, he 
took from all literatures their best and essential. A 
Platonic idealist, he was not averse to the inductive 
method of Aristotle ; he had the Alexandrian faith 
and ecstasy, the Epicurean zest and faculty of selec- 
tion ; like the Stoics, he observed morals, heroism, 
self-denial, and frugality. There is much in his teach- 
ings that recalls the beautiful ethics of Marcus Au- 
relius, and the words of Epictetus, as reported by 
Arrian. His spiritual leanings never stinted his re- 
gard of men and manners. He kept a sure eye on 
the world ; he was not only a philosopher, but the 
paragon of gentlemen, with something more than the 
Oriental, the Grecian, or the Gallic, tact. He relished 



A PLATONIC IDEALIST. 



14, 



to the full the brave clistinclions, the portraitures and 
tests of Plutarch, and found the best of all good 
conipan)' in the worldly wise, the cheery and comfort- 
able Montaigne. One may almost say that he re lined 
and digested what was good in all philosophies, and 
nothing more. He would get hold of Swedenborg, 
the mystic, yet not be Swedenborg exclusively, nor 
imitate the rhetoric of the Sophists, the pride of the 
Cynics. From all he learned what each confesses in 
the end, — the limitations of inquiry, — that the Finite 
cannot measure, though it may feel, the Infinite, No 
more would he formulate a philosophy, but within it 
he could recognize nature, art, taste, morals, laws, re- 
ligion, and the chance of immortality. When it was 
said that he had no new system, he thought that he 
needed none, and was sceptical of classification. 

It appears that he found the key to his own na- 
ture in Plato, being an idealist first of all. His intu- 
itive faculty was so determined that ideality and mys- 
ticism gave him the surest promise of realities ; his 
own intellect satisfied him of the power of intellect. 
Plainly hearing an interior voice, he had no doubt 
that other men were similarly monished. Plato, the 
guide of his youth, remained his type of philosopher 
and man. To Plato's works alone should Omar's 
saying of the Koran be applied : " Burn the libraries, 
for their value is in this book." Nowhere else was 
there such a range of speculation. " Out of Plato 
come all things." And thus he held to the last. 
" Of Plato," he said, years afterward, " I hesitate to 
speak, lest there should be no end. . . . Why should 
not young men be educated on this book ? It would 
suffice for the tuition of the race." Yet Emerson's 
philosophy was a greater advance from Neo-Platonism 
than the Alexandrians were able to make upon the 



His ivis- 
dotn 1171- 
/orjHulat- 
cd. 



riato his 
early 
guide and 

type. 



144 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 



special 
likeness of 
Enter so7t 
to Ploti- 

tiUS. 



Standards 
ff great- 
ness. 



lines indicated by their elemental master. In per- 
sonal life and bearing, Plotinus, with whom our poet 
seems to have been most in sympathy, was very closely 
his prototype. Tliere is first to be noted the curious 
resemblance between the eclectic, investigating Alex- 
andrian age and our present time ; and secondly, it 
is Plotinus of whom we are told that " He lived at 
the same time with himself and wdth others, and the 
inward activity of his spirit ceased only during his 
hours of sleep. . . . His written style was close, preg- 
nant, and richer in thought than in words, yet enthu- 
siastic, and always pointing to the main object. He 
was more eloquent in his oral communications, and 
was said to be very clever in finding the appropriate 
word, even if he failed in accuracy on the whole. 
Besides this, the beauty of his person was increased 
when discoursing ; his countenance was lighted up 
with genius." Taylor's translations of selections from 
the Works of Plotinus, published in 1817 and 1834, 
must have fallen into Emerson's hands, and I am 
satisfied of their impression upon his mind. As one 
examines the lives and writings of the two men, the 
likeness is still more notable, especially with respect 
to their views of fate, will, ethics, the " higher law," 
the analysis of the beautiful, and in the ardor with 
which young students, and many of the elderly and 
wdse, listened to their respective teachings. Emerson 
was a Plotinus reanimate after the lapse of sixteen 
centuries of Christianity. He has now, like the Neo- 
Platonist, " led back the Divine principle within " him 
" to the God who is all in all." 

To the great thinkers of the past, the New England 
teacher, without fear or boasting, well might feel him- 
self allied. The accepted great, free of the ordinary 
bounds of place and time, recognize one another 



MASTER AND SCHOOL. 



145 



across the vague, like stars of the prime magnitude in 
the open night. Emerson knew the haps and signs 
of genius : " Whenever we find a man higher by a 
whole head than any of his contemporaries, it is sure 
to come in doubt what are his real works." We can- 
not say " What is master, and what school." " As 
for their borrowings and adaptings, they know how to 
borrow. ... A great man is one of the affinities, who 
takes of everything." But they are not above the law 
of perfect life ; virtue, simplicity, absolute sincerity, 
these are their photosphere. " Live as on a moun- 
tain. Let men see, let them know, a real man, who 
lives as he was meant to live." To this Roman stand- 
ard the New Englander subjoined the shrewd, kindly 
wisdom of his stock and region. He was eminent 
among those whose common sense is the most telling 
point to be made against Locke's negation of innate 
ideas, — whose judgment is so apt that, granting 
Locke's theory, it can be accounted for only by the 
modern theory of ideas prenatal and inherited. His 
written wisdom is more effective than Montaisrne's, be- 
ing less dependent on citations. He knew by instinct 
w^hat our novelists learn from observation and experi- 
ence ; or is it that they study chiefly their own time 
and neighborhood, while he sat aloof and with the 
ages ? Thus strong in equipment, sound in heart, 
and lofty of intellect, we find him revered by his pu- 
pils, and without a living peer in the faculty of ele- 
vating the purpose of those who listened to his buoy- 
ant words. We must confess that a differentiation 
between master and school, and between members of 
the school, after awhile became manifest. That such 
a process was inevitable is plain, when Emerson's 
transcendental and self-reliant laws of conduct are 
kept in mind. 

10 



Iwtate 
■wisdottu 



146 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 



Tran- 
scendental 
and 171- 
ductive 
methods 
contrasted. 



The mas- 
ter and his 
fuj>ils. 



One may say, in illustration, that his philosophical 
method bears to the inductive or empirical a relation 
similar to that between the poetry of self-expression 
and the poetry of aesthetic creation, — a relation of 
the subjective to the objective. The former kind of 
verse often is the more spontaneous, since it has its 
birth in the human need for utterance. It is the 
cry of adolescence and femininity, the resource of 
sensitive natures in which emotion outvies the sense 
of external beauty or power. It was the voice of 
Shakespeare's youth, nor was it ever quieted through- 
out the restless careers of Byron, Heine, and De 
Musset. But we accept as the great works of the 
poets their intellectual and objective creations, wherein 
the artist has gone beyond his own joy and pain, his 
narrow intro-vision, to observe, combine, transfigure, 
the outer world of nature and life. Such the epics, 
idyls, dramas, of the masters. When subjective poe- 
try is the yield of a lofty nature, or of an ideal and 
rapturous womanhood like Mrs. Browning's, it is a 
boon and revelation to us all ; but when, as too often, 
it is the spring-rise of a purling, commonplace stream- 
let, its egotism grows pitiful and repulsive. This 
lesson has been learned, and now our minor poets, 
in their fear of it, strive to give pleasure to our sense 
of the beautiful, and work as artists, — though some- 
what too delicately, — rather than to pose as excep- 
tional beings, " among men, but not of them." 

As with the subjective poets, so with many of the 
transcendental acolytes. The force of Emerson lay 
in the depth and clearness of his intentions. He 
gave us the revelation and prophecy of a man among 
millions. Such a teacher aids the self-development 
of noble minds ; his chief peril is that of nurturing 
a weaker class that cannot follow where he leads. 



EFFECT OF HIS TEACHINGS. 



147 



Some of its enthusiasts will scarcely fail to set too 
high a value upon their personal impulses. They 
" still revere," but forget to " still suspect " them- 
selves " in lowliness of heart." For the rest, the 
down-East instinct is advisory and homilctic ; New 
Englanders are prone to teach, and slow^er to be 
taught. Emerson, however, grew to be their superior 
man, the one to whom all agreed to listen, and from 
whom all quote. His example, also, has somewhat 
advanced the art of listening, in which he was so 
perfect, w^ith forward head and bright, expectant vis- 
age. His inculcations were of freedom, of the self- 
guidance that learns to unlearn and bears away from 
tradition ; yet this, too, will breed false liberty of 
conceit in minor votaries, whose inward light may do 
well enough for themselves, yet not suffice for the 
light of the world. Hence the public, accepting 
Emerson, has been less tolerant of more than one 
Emersonian, with his ego, et rex mens. After all is 
said, we must see that our transcendentalists w^ere a 
zealous, aspiring band of seekers after the true, the 
beautiful, and the good ; what they have lacked in 
deference they have made up in earnestness and 
spirituality. There have been receptive natures 
among them, upon whom, as indeed upon the genius 
of his people far and wide, the tonic effect of Emer- 
son's life and precept has been immeasurable. Goe- 
the's declaration of himself that he had been " to the 
Germans in general, and to the young German poets 
in particular, their liberator," may, with perfect truth, 
be applied to Emerson, and to a generation that has 
thriven on his word. He has taught his countrymen 
the worth of virtue, wisdom, courage, — above all, to 
fashion life upon a self-reliant pattern, obeying the 
dictates of their own souls. 



Diverse 
results of 
his influ- 
ence. 



A libera- 
tor. 



148 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 



Emerson^ 
the Poet. 



" Poems, ''^ 
1847. 

" 3fay~ 
Day, and 
Other 
Pieces,'''' 

1867. 

''Poems,'' 
1876. 



Philosophy 
transfig- 
ured. 



His view 
of Art. 



Fitness of 
things. 



IV. 

Recognizing Emerson's high mood as that of a 
most original poet, I wish chiefly to consider his 
relations to poetry and the poetic art. His imagi- 
native essays are not poems. Speech is not songj 
the rarest mosaic lacks the soul of the canvas swept 
by the brush. The credentials that he presented from 
time to time, and mostly in that dawn when poets 
sing if ever, are few and fragmentary, but they will 
suffice. They are the trophies, the wreaths and 
golden vessels, the spolia opima, which he set before 
the shrine of the goddess. They are the avowal of 
a rare spirit that there are things which cannot be 
rendered in prose ; that Poetry claims a finer art, a 
supremer utterance, for her service, and that she 
alone can stamp the coins and bronzes which carry 
to the future the likeness of her viceroy. 

In his verse, Emerson's spiritual philosophy and 
laws of conduct appear again, but transfigured. Al- 
ways the idea of Soul, central and pervading, of 
which Nature's forms are but the created symbols. 
As in his early discourse he recognized two entities, 
Nature and the Soul, so to the last he believed Art 
to be simply the union of Nature with man's will — 
Thought symbolizing itself through Nature's aid. 
Thought, sheer ideality, was his sovereign ; he was 
utterly trustful of its guidance. The law of poetic 
beauty depends on the beauty of the thought, which, 
perforce, assumes the fittest, and therefore most 
charming, mode of expression. The key to art is 
the eternal fitness of things ; this is the sure test and 
solvent. Over and again he asserted his conviction : 
" Great thoughts insure musical expression. Every 
word should be the right word. . . . The Imagina- 



THE UNIVERSAL SOUL. 



149 



tion wakened brings its own language, and tiiat is 
always musical. . . . Whatever language the poet uses, 
the secret of tone is at the heart of the poem." He 
cites ]\loIler, who taught that the building which was 
fitted accurately to answer its end would turn out to 
be beautiful, though beauty had not been intended. 
(The enforced beauty of even the rudest sailing craft 
always has seemed to me the most striking illustra- 
tion of this truth.) In fine, Emerson sees all forms 
of art symbolizing but one Reason, not one mind, 
but The Mind that made the world. He refers '* all 
production at last to an aboriginal Power." It is 
easy to discern that from the first he recognized " the 
motion and the spirit," which to Wordsworth were 
revealed only by the discipline of 3^ears ; but his song 
went beyond the range of landscape and peasant, 
touching upon the verities of life and thought. 
" Brahma " is the presentation of the truth manifest 
to the oldest and most eastern East, and be3^ond 
which the West can never go. How strange that 
these quatrains could have seemed strange ! They 
reveal the light of Asia, but no less the thought of 
Plato — who said that in all nations certain minds 
dwell on the " fundamental Unity," and " lose all 
being in one Being." Everywhere one stuff, under 
all forms, this the woven symbolism of the universal 
Soul, the only reality, the single and subdivided Iden- 
tity that alone can " keep and pass and turn again," 
that is at once the doubter and the doubt, the slayer 
and the slain, light and shadow, the hither and the 
yon. Love is but the affinity of its portions, the de- 
sire for reunion, the knowledge of soul by soul, to 
which the eyes of lovers are but windows. Art is the 
handiwork of the soul, with materials created by it- 
self, building better than it knows, the bloom of at- 
traction and necessity. 



A 



A II art a 
rcjlcx of 
iJie luiivcT^ 
sal soul. 



" Brah" 
inay 



I50 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 



Our lyric 



Margaret 
F tiller'' s 
cojnment. 



Why Di- 
dacticism, 
repels us. 



Thus far the theory of Emerson's song. It does 
not follow that he composed upon a theory. At 
times I think him the first of our lyric poets, his 
turns are so wild and unexpected ; and he was never 
commonplace, even when writing for occasions. His 
verse changes unawares from a certain tension and 
angularity that were congenital, to an ethereal, un- 
hampered freedom, the poetic soul in full glow, the 
inner music loosed and set at large. Margaret Fuller 
wrote that his poems were " mostly philosophical, 
which is not the truest kind of poetry." But this 
depends upon the measure of its didacticism. Emer- 
son made philosophical poetry imaginative, elevating, 
and thus gave new evidence that the poet's realm is 
unbounded. If he sought first principles, he looked 
within himself for them, and thus portrays himself, 
not only the penetrative thinker, but the living man, 
the citizen, the New England villager, whose symbols 
are drawn from the actual woods and hills of a neigh- 
borhood. Certainly he went to rural nature for his 
vigor, his imagery and adornments. An impassioned 
sense of its beauty made him the reverse of the tra- 
ditional descriptive poet. Most poetry of nature justly 
is termed didactic ; most philosophical verse the same. 
Miss Fuller failed to make distinctions. All feel what 
didacticism signifies, but let us try to formulate it. 

Didacticism is the gospel of half-truths. Its senses 
are torpid ; it fails to catch and convey the soul of 
truth, which is beauty. Truth shorn of its beauty is 
tedious and not poetical. We weary of didactic verse, 
therefore, not because of its truth, but because of its 
self-delusive falsehood. It flourishes with a dull and 
prosaic generation. The true poet, as Mrs. Browning 
saw, is your only truth-teller, because he gives the 
truth complete in beauty or not at all. 



ON NATURE'S HIDDEN TRAIL. 



151 



Emerson doubts his power to capture the very truth 
of nature. Its essence — its beauty — is so elusive ; 
it flees and leaves but a corpse behind ; it is the 
pearly glint of the shells among the bubbles of the 
latest wave : — 

** I fetched my sea-born treasures home ; 
j But the poor, unsightly, noisome things 

Had left their beauty on the shore, 
With the sun, and the sand, and the wild uproar." 

But such poems as the " Forerunners " show how 
closely he moved, after all, upon the trail of the evad- 
ing sprite. He seemed, by the first intention, and 
with an exact precision of grace and aptness, to put 
in phrases what he saw and felt, — and he saw and 
felt so much more than others ! He had the aborig- 
inal eye, and the civilized sensibility; he caught both 
the external and the scientific truth of natural things, 
and their poetic charm withal. As he triumphed over 
the untruthfulness of the mere verse-maker, and the 
dulness of the moralist, his instant, sure, yet airy 
transcripts gave his poems of nature a quality with 
out a counterpart. Some of his measures had at least 
the flutter of the twig whence the bird has just flown. 
He did not quite fail of that music music-born, 



" a melody born of melody, 

Which melts the world into a sea. 
Toil could never compass it ; 
Art its height could never hit." 

He infused his meditations with the sheen of Day it- 
self, — of 

" one of the charmed days 

When the genius of God doth flow ; 

The wind may alter twenty ways, 

A tempest cannot blow ; 

It may blow north, it still is warm ; 

Or south, it still is clear; 



Elusive 
tiaiurc. 



Emerson 
close upon 
Iter trail. 



A 



" Wood- 
note s.^'^ 



^52 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 



« The 
Problem.'''' 



" May- 
Day:' 



A Iways 
the 07te aj>t 
word. 



A rtless- 
vess. 



Or east, it smells like a clover-farm ; 
Or west, no thunder fear." 

He returns with delight to Nature's blending of hei 
laws of beauty and use, perceiving that she 

"beats in perfect tune, 

And rounds with rhyme her every rune, 

Whether she work in land or sea, 

Or hide underground her alchemy. 

Thou canst not wave thy staff in air, 

Or dip thy paddle in the lake, 

But it carves the bow of beauty there, 

And the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake." 

" Woodnotes " is full of lyrical ecstasy and light- 
some turns and graces. To assimilate such a poem 
of nature, or "The Problem," that masterpiece of 
religion and art, is to feed on holy dew, and to com- 
prehend how the neophytes who were bred upon it 
find the manna of noontide somewhat rank and innu- 
tritious. " May-Day " is less lyrical, more plainly de- 
scriptive of the growth and meaning of the Spring, but 
not in any part didactic. It is the record of the poet's 
training, a match to Wordsworth's portrayal of his 
subjective communing with Nature in youth ; its spirit 
is the same with Lowell's woodland joyousness, one 
of child-like and unquestioning zest. Finally, this 
poet's scenic joinery is so true, so mortised with the 
one apt w^ord, as where he says that the wings of 
Time are ^'' pied with morning and with night," and the 
one best word or phrase is so unlocked for, that, as I 
say, we scarcely know whether all this comes by grace 
of instinct, or with search and artistic forethought. It 
seems " the first fine careless rapture " ; the labor, 
which results in the truth of Tennyson's landscape 
and the pathos of Longfellow's, may be there, but is 
not to be detected, and in these touches, if not other- 
wise, he excelled his compeers. His generalizations 



PROPHETIC INTUITION. 



153 



pertain to the unseen world ; viewing the actual, he 
puts its strength and fineness alike into a line or epi- 
thet. He was born with an unrivalled faculty of se- 
lection. Monadnock is the "constant giver," the Titan 
that " heeds his sky-affairs " ; the tiny humming-bee a 
"voyager of light and noon," a "yellow-breeched phi- 
losopher," and again an " animated torrid zone " ; the 
defiant titmouse, an " atom in full breath." For a 
snow-storm, or the ocean, he uses his broader brush, 
but once only and well. His minute truth and sense 
of values are held in honor by his pupils Whitman 
and Burroughs, our poetic familiars of the field, and 
by all to whom the seasonable marvels of the pas- 
toral year are not unwelcome or unknown. 

Thus keenly Emerson's instinct responded to the 
beauty of Nature. I have hinted that her secure 
laws were the chief promoters of his imagination. It 
coursed along her hidden ways. In this he antedated 
Tennyson, and was less didactic than Goethe and 
kindred predecessors. His foresight gave spurs to 
the intellect of Tyndall and other investigators, — to 
their ideal faculty, without which no explorer moves 
from post to outpost of discovery. Correlatively, each 
wonder-breeding point attained by the experimental- 
ists was also occupied by our eager and learned thinker 
from the moment of its certainty. Each certainty gave 
him joy ; reasoning a priori from his sense of a spirit- 
ual Force, the seer anticipated the truths demonstrated 
by the inductive w^orkers, and expected the demon- 
stration. Even in " The Sphinx," the first poem of 
his first collection, the conservation of force, the evo- 
lution from the primordial atom, are made to subserve 
his mystical faith in a broad Identity, Here, thirty 
years before Tennyson made his most compact ex- 
pression of the central truth, — 



His epi- 
thets. 



.\ 



Scientific 
prescience. 



Darwin 
antici- 
pated. 



" The 
Sphinx."*' 



154 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 



Thi seer 
of evolu- 
tion. 



** Flower in the crannied wall . . . 
Little flower — but if I could understand 
What you are, root and all, and all in all, 
I should know what God and man is," 
Emerson had put it in this wise : — 

" Thorough a thousand voices 
Spoke the universal dame : 
*Who telleth one of my meanings, 
Is master of all I am.'" 

The reference, in "Bacchus," to the ascent of life 
from form to form, still remains incomparable for terse- 
ness and poetic illumination : — 

" I, drinking this, 

Shall hear far Chaos talk with me ; 

Kings unborn shall walk with me ; 

And the poor grass shall plot and plan 

What it will do when it is man." 

And in " Woodnotes " he discoursed of 

" the genesis of things, 

Of tendency through endless ages, 
Of star-dust and star-pilgrimages, 
Of rounded worlds, of space and time, 
Of the old flood's subsiding slime " ; 

but always thinks of the universal Soul as the only 
reality, — of creation's process as simply the meta- 
morphosis which 

" Melts things that be to things that seem, 
And solid nature to a dream." 

Even in the pathetic " Threnody " he stays his an- 
guish with faith in the beneficence of Law. With 
more passion and less method than afterward gave 
form to "In Memoriam," he declared that the "mys- 
teries of Nature's heart " were " past the blasphemies 
of grief." He saw 

"the genius of the whole, 



Ascendant in the primal soul, 
Beckon it when to go and come.' 



HIS THEORY OF SECLUSIO.V. 



155 



Such a poet was not like to go backward. The 
" Song of Nature " is his pa^an to her verities, still 
more clearly manifest in his riper years. This superb 
series of quatrains, cumulative as thunder-heads and 
fired with lyric glory, will lend its light to whatsoever 
the poetry of the future has in reserve for us. 

It should be noted that Emerson's vision of the sub- 
lime in scientific discovery increased his distaste for 
mere style, and moved him to contentment with the 
readiest mode of expression. It tempered his eulogy 
of " Art," and made him draw this contrast : " Nature 
transcends all moods of thought, and its secret we do 
not yet find. But a gallery stands at the mercy of our 
moods, and there is a moment when it becomes frivo- 
lous. I do not wonder that Newton, with an attention 
habitually engaged on the paths of planets and suns, 
should have wondered what the Earl of Pembroke 
found to admire in 'stone dolls.'" 

Right here we observe (deferring matters of con- 
struction) that our seer's limitations as a poet are in- 
dicated by his dependence on out-door nature, and by 
his failure to utilize those higher symbols of the prime 
Intelligence which comprise the living, acting, suffer- 
ing world of man. With a certain pride of reserve, 
that did not lessen his beautiful deference to individ- 
uals, he proclaimed " the advantage which the country 
life possesses for a powerful mind over the artificial 
and curtailed life of cities." He justified solitude by 
saying that great men, from Plato to Wordsworth, did 
not live in a crowd, but descended into it from time to 
time as benefactors. ^ Above all he declared — "I am 
by nature a poet, and therefore must live in the coun- 
try." But here a Goethe, or De INIusset, or Browning 
might rejoin : " And I am a poet, and need the focal 
life of the town." If man be the paragon of life on 



'' Sofigof 
Nature.^'' 



Science 
afid A rt. 
Cp. " l^ic- 
ioriatt 
Poets'' : 
pp, 12-16. 



Emerson''s 
limita- 
tions. 



Narroiv- 
171^ the 
poet's/ran" 
chise. 



156 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 



-4 



Z ife, ac- 
L'oJi, and 
fiissiou, 
7 V anting 
in his 
song. 



this globe, his works and passions the rarest symbols 
of the life unseen, then the profound est study is man- 
kind. Emerson's theorem was a restriction of the 
poet's liberties. One can name great poets who would 
have been greater but for the trammels of their seclu- 
sion. I believe that Emerson's came from self-knowl- 
edge. He kept his range with incomparable tact and 
philosophy. Poets of a wider franchise — with Shake- 
speare at their front — have found that genius gains 
most from Nature during that formative period when 
one reads her heart, if ever, and that afterward he may 
safely leave her, as a child his mother, to return from 
time to time, but still to do his part among the ranks 
of men. 

Emerson makes light of travel for pleasure and ob- 
servation, but ever more closely would observe the 
ways of the inanimate world. Yet what are man's 
works but the works of Nature by one remove? To 
one poet is given the ear to comprehend the murmur 
of the forest, to another the sense that times the heart- 
beats of humanity. Few have had Emerson's inward 
eye, but it is well that some have not been restricted 
to it. He clung by attraction, no less than by circum- 
stance, to " a society in which introspection," as Mr. 
James has shrewdly written, " thanks to the want of 
other entertainment, played almost the part of a so- 
cial resource." His verse, in fact, is almost wholly 
void of the epic and dramatic elements which inform 
the world's great works of art Action, characteriza- 
tion, specific sympathy, and passion are wanting in his 
song. His voice comes " like a falling star " from a 
skyey dome of pure abstraction. Once or twice, some 
little picture from life, — a gypsy girl, a scarcely out- 
lined friend or loved one, — but otherwise no person- 
age in his works except, it may be, the poet himself^ 



RADIAXT BUT HIGH-REMOVED. 



157 



the Saadi of his introspective song : even that wise 
and joyous bard restored in fragments, suggested rather 
than portrayed. Emerson would be the " best bard, 
because the wisest," if the wisdom of his song illus- 
trated itself in li\ing types. He knew the human 
world, none better, and generalized the sum of its at- 
tainments, — was gracious, shrewd, and calm, — but 
could not hold up the mirror and show us to ourselves. 
He was that unique songster, a poet of fire and vision, 
quite above the moralist, yet neither to be classed as 
objective or subjective ; he perceived the source of all 
passion and wisdom, yet rendered neither the hearts of 
others nor his own. His love poetry is eulogized, but 
it wants the vital grip wherewith his " Concord Fight " 
and '■ Boston Hymn " fasten on our sense of manhood 
and patriotism. It chants of Love, not of the beloved ; 
its flame is pure and general as moonlight and as 
high-removed. " All mankind love a lover," and it is 
not enough to discourse upon the philosophy of " Love," 
" Experience," " Power," " Friendship." Emerson's 
" Bacchus " must press for him 

"wine, but wine which never grew 

In the belly of the grape." 

His deepest yearnings are expressed in that passion- 
ate outburst, — the momentary human wail over his 
dead child, — and in the human sense of lost com- 
panionship when he tells us, — 

" In the long sunny afternoon, 
The plain was full of ghosts." 

Oftener he moves apart ; his blood is ichor, not our 
own ; his thoughts are with the firmament. We rev- 
erence his vocation, and know ourselves unfitted for 
it. He touches life more nearly in passages that have 
the acuteness, the practical wisdom of his prose works 
and days ; but these are not his testimonials as a poet. 



Charac- 
teristics. 



A 



158 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 



A layer on 
of ha?ids. 



Rossetti. 



Metrical 
Uyle. 



His laying on of hands was more potent ; a trans- 
mitted heat has gone abroad through the ministry of 
his disciples, who practise as he preached, and some- 
times transcend both his preaching and his praqtice. 
All the same, the originator of a force is greater than 
others who add four-fold to its momentum. They are 
never so manifestly his pupils as when they are " scar- 
ifying " and " sounding and exploring " him, "re- 
porting where they touch bottom and where not," on 
ground of their own, but with a pleasant mockery of 
the master's word and wont. There was a semblance 
between the poets Emerson and Rossetti, first, in the 
small amount of their lyrical work, and again in the 
positive influence which each exerted upon his pupils. 
In quality the Concord seer, and the English poet who 
was at once the most spiritual and sensuous of his 
own school, were wholly unlike. Rossetti was touched 
with white fire, but dreamed of souls that meet and 
glow when disembodied. The spirits of his beatified 
thrill with human passion. Our seer brought some- 
thing of heaven to earth, while Rossetti yearned to 
carry life through death to heaven. 

The technical features of Emerson's verse corre- 
spond to our idea of its meaning. In fact, his view of 
personal culture also applied to his metrical style. 
" Manners are not to be directly cultivated. That is 
frivolous ; leave it to children. . . . We must look at 
the mark, not at the arrow, and perhaps the best rule 
is Lord Bacon's, — that to attain good forms one only 
needs not to despise them." Delicate and adroit 
artisans, in whose eyes poetry is solely a piece of 
design, may find the awkwardness of Emerson's verse 
a bar to right comprehension of its frequent beauty 
and universal purpose. I am not sure but one must 
be of the poet's own country and breeding to loofe 



SLIGHT CONSTRUCTIVE FACULTY. 



159 



quite down his vistas and by-paths : for every Amer- 
ican has something of Emerson in him, and the secret 
of the Land was in the poet, — the same Americanism 
that Whitman sees in "the farmer, the deck-hand, the 
snag-toothed hostler, atoning with its humanities for 
their sins past and present, as for the sins of Harte's 
gamblers and diggers of the gulch. It may be, too, 
that other conditions are needed to open the ear to 
the melody, and to shut out the discords, of Emerson's 
song. The melody is there, and though the range be 
narrow, is various within itself. The charm is that of 
new-world and native wood-notes wild. Not seldom a 
lyrical phrase is the more taking for its halt, — helped 
out, like the poet's own speech, by the half-stammer 
and pause that were wont to precede the rarest or 
weightiest word of all. 

Among the followers of any art there are those 
whose compositions are effective in the mass, their 
treatment broad, the beauty pervasive ; again, those 
who with small constructive feeling are rich in detail, 
and whose work is interspersed with fine and origi- 
nal touches ; lastly, the complete artists, in whom, 
however vivid their originality and great their special 
beauties, the general design is always kept in hand. 
Emerson never felt the strength of proportion that 
compels the races to whom art is a religion and a law. 
He has given many a pang to lovers of the beautiful, 
who have endured his irreverence by allowing for his 
supposed disabilities. He satisfied his conscience in 
the same easy way, declaring that he was from his 
" very incapacity of mechanical writing " a " chartered 
libertine." But his speech bewrayeth him. Who sounds 
one perfect chord can sound again. His greater ef- 
forts in verse, as iti prose, show that he chose to 
deprecate the constructive faculty lest it might limit 



Native 

ivood-7toit'} 

wild. 



Deficicyit 
sense of 
proportio>u 



i6o 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 



A 7ionco?i- 
formist. 



Miss Ful- 
ler on his 
synthesis. 



Unique 
lyrics and 
notable 
sayings. 



his ease and freedom. And his instinct of person- 
ality, not without a pride of its own, made him a non- 
conformist. We are told of his mode of preparing an 
essay, — of the slow-growing m'edley of thoughts on a 
topic, at last brought out and strung at random, like 
a child's variegated beads. But I do not find that his 
best essays read backward as well as forward ; I sus- 
pect an art beneath their loose arrangement, and 1 
see at times the proof of continuous heat. His early 
critic declared that he had not " written one good 
work, if such a work be one where the whole com- 
mands more attention than the parts." But again we 
see that she too rarely qualified her oracles. At that 
time he had written poems of which the whole and the 
parts were at least justly related masterpieces, — lyrical 
masterpieces, of course, not epic or dramatic j of such 
were the "Threnody" and " Woodnotes," to which 
was afterward added the " May-Day." Breadth and 
propordon, in a less degree, mark "The Problem," 
" Monadnock," " Merlin," and a few other pieces. 
But working similarly he falls short in the labored 
dithyrambic, " Initial, Demonic, and Celestial Love." 
He was formal enough in youth, before he struck out 
for himself, and at the age of eleven, judging from his 
practice-work, was as precocious as Bryant or Poe. 
But he soon gave up construction, putting a trade- 
mark upon his verse, and trusting that freedom would 
lead to something new. So many precious sayings en- 
rich his more sustained poems as to make us include 
him at times with the complete artists. Certainly, both 
in these and in the unique bits so characteristic that 
they are the poet himself, — "Terminus," " Character," 
" Manners," " Nature," etc., — he ranks with the fore- 
most of the second class, poets eminent for special 
graces, values, sudden meteors of thought. In that 



'SAVnVGS GRAVED IN GOLD: 



i6i 



gift for " saying things," so notable in Pope and Ten- 
nyson, he is the chief of American poets. From what 
other bard have so many orighial hnes and phrases 
passed into literature, — inscriptions that do not wear 
out, graven in bright and standard gold? It is worth 
while, for the mere effect, to group some of them 
together, and especially those which, appearing in his 
first book forty years ago, long since became a con- 
stituent part of our literary thought and expression : — 

" 'T is the law of bush and stone, 
Each can only take his own." 

** The thoughts that he shall think 
Shall not be forms of stars, but stars, 
Nor pictures pale, but Jove and Mars." 

" Hast thou named all the birds without a gun .'' 
Loved the wood- rose and left it on its stalk.-*" 

" Heartily know, 
When half-gods go 
The gods arrive." 

" What is excellent, 
As God lives, is permanent ; 
Hearts are dust, hearts' loves remain." 

" Born for the future, to the future lost." 

" Not for all his faith can see 
Would I that cowled churchman be." 

" Not from a vain or shallow thought 
His awful Jove young Phidias brought ; 

Out from the heart of nature rolled 
The burdens of the Bible old." 

"The hand that rounded Peter's dome 



II 



" yewels 
. . ■ on tin 
stretcJied 
forefingey 
of all 



l62 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 

Wrought in a sad sincerity; 
Himself from God he could not free ; 
He builded better than he knew ; — 
The conscious stone to beauty grew." 

" Earth proudly wears the Parthenon 
As the best gem upon her zone ; 
And Morning opes with haste her lids^ 
To gaze upon the Pyramids." 

*' One accent of the Holy Ghost 
The heedless world hath never lost." 



*' Or ever the wild Time coined itself 
Into calendar months and days." 

" Set not thy foot on graves." 

" Good-bye, proud world ! I 'm going home." 

" What are they all, in their high conceit, 

When man in the bush with God may meet } " 

" — If eyes were made for seeing, 
Then Beauty is its own excuse for being." 

" Leave all thy pedant lore apart, 
God hid the whole world in thy heart." 

" And conscious Law is King of kings." 

" — Mount to paradise 
By the stairway of surprise." 

" Here once the embattled farmers stood, 
And fired the shot heard round the worId«^^ 

" Great is the art, 
Great be the manners, of the bard." 

" The silent organ loudest chants 
The master's requiem." 



RHYTHMICAL COMPRESSION. 



^63 



Verses from Emerson's later poems, — which came 
at rare intervals, after the public had learned to seek 
for the sweet kernel in every nut that fell from his 
tree, — are scarcely less familiarized and put to use : — 

" Deep in the man sits fast his fate 
To mould his fortunes mean or great: 
Unknown to Cromwell as to me 
Was Cromwell's measure or degree." 

**0 tenderly the haughty day 
Fills his blue urn with fire ! " 

" I hung my verses in the wind, 
Time and tide their faults may find; 
All were winnowed through and through, 
Five lines lasted sound and true." 

" Winters know 
Easily to shed the snow, 
And the untaught Spring is wise 
In cowslips and anemones." 

** It is time to be old, 
To take in sail, — 

Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime : 
* Lowly faithful, banish fear, 
Right onward drive unharmed ; 
The port, well worth the cruise, is near, 
And every wave is charmed.'" 

" He spoke, and words more soft than rain 
Brought the Age of Gold again ; 
His action won such reverence sweet 
As hid all measure of the feat." 

The poet's rhythm and gift of compression made 
verse like the foregoing a kind of ambrosial pemmi- 
can, easily carried for spiritual sustenance. Phrases 
in his prose, which have become more current, move 



Newfclic- 
ities. 



Rhyth. 
tnical coitt 
pression. 



1 64 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 



Unsur- 
passed in- 
lyrical 
^^ quality.'''' 



in foot-beats, such as, — " Hitch your wagon to a 
star," "Nature is loved by what is best in us," and 
"The hues of sunset make life great." He thought 
rhythm indispensable, and rhyme most efficacious, as 
the curators of poetic thought. " Every good poem I 
know I recall by its rhythm also." 

Popular instinct, recognized by those who compile 
our anthologies, forbids an author to be great in more 
than one way. These editors go to Emerson for 
point and wisdom, and too seldom for his truth to 
nature and his strictly poetic charm. Yet who excels 
him in quality ? That Margaret Fuller had a fine 
ear, and an independent one, is proved by her admis- 
sion that "in melody, in subtilty of thought and ex- 
pression," he took the highest rank. He often cap- 
tures us with absolute beauty, the poetry that poets 
love, — the lilt and melody of Shelley (whose vague- 
ness irked him) joined to precision of thought and 
outline, Poe might have envied " Uriel " his lutings 
of the spangled heaven ; he could not have read 
"Woodnotes," or he would have found something kin- 
dred in the bard who said, — 

"Quit thy friends as the dead in doom, 
And build to them a final tomb ; 
Let the starred shade that nightly falls 
Still celebrate their funerals, 
And the bell of beetle and of bee 
Knell their melodious memory." 

Emerson "listened to the undersong," but rejoiced 
no less in the " divine ideas below " of the Olympian 

bards, 

"Which always find us young 
And always keep us so." 

His modes of expression, like his epithets, are imag- 
I inative. The snow is " the north-wind's masonry " i 



' threnody: — ' merlin: 



165 



feeling and thought are scarcely deeper than his 
speech ; he puts in words the " tumultuous privacy of 
storm," or the " sweet varieties of chance." With 
what high ecstasy of pain he calls upon the deep- 
eyed boy, the hyacinthine boy, of his marvellous 
" Threnody ! " Time confirms the first impression 
that this is the most spontaneous, the most elevating, 
of lyrical elegies, — that it transcends even the divine 
verse of Bishop King's invocation to his entombed 
wife. How abrupt, how exquisitely ideal, the open- 
ing phrase ! Afterward, and throughout, the pure 
spirit of poetry rarefied by the passion of its theme : 
the departed child is the superangelic symbol of the 
beauty, the excellence, that shall be when time ripens 
and the harmonies of nature are revealed, — when life 
is no longer a dream within a dream. Read the 
" Threnody " anew. What grace ! What ^olian 
music, what yearning ! What prophecy and exalta- 
tion ! See how emotion becomes the soul of art. Or 
is it that true passion cannot but express itself in 
verse at once simple and sensuous, thus meeting all 
the cardinal points of Milton's law.? 

One readily perceives that " Merlin " conveys Em- 
erson's spirited conception of the art and manners of 
the bard. His should be no trivial harp : — 

" No jingling serenader's art, 
Nor tinkle of piano strings ; 

The kingly bard 

Must smite the cords rudely and hard, 

As with hammer or with mace ; 

He shall not his brain encumber 
With the coil of rhythm and number ; 
But leaving rule and pale forethought. 
He shall aye climb 
For his rhyme." 



The A 

" Thren- 
ody. ■'■' 



A 



''Merlin."* 



i66 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON, 



Emerson 
and Whit- 
man. 



Favorite 
poets and 
measures. 



Thus fearlessly should a poet compel the Muse ; 
and even to a broader liberty of song one, at least, 
of Emerson's listeners pushed with deliberate zeal. 
Walt Whitman was stimulated by this teaching, and 
by the rugged example of Carlyle, to follow resolutely 
the method which suited his bent and project ; and 
Emerson's " Mithridates," we may say, is at once the 
key-note and best defence of Whitman's untrammelled, 
all-heralding philosophy. The descriptive truth, the 
lusty Americanism, of the democratic chanter took 
hold upon the master's expectant heart. A later mod- 
ification of the first welcome, and the omission of the 
new songs from "Parnassus," had no bearing upon 
the question of their morals or method ; Emerson 
was moved solely by his taste, — and New England 
taste has a supreme dislike of the unsavory. The 
world, even the Concord world, is not wholly given 
over to prudery. It has little dread, nowadays, of 
the voluptuous in art, ancient or modern. But to 
those of Puritan stock cleanliness is even more than 
godliness. There is no " fair perdition " tempting us 
in the "Song of Myself" and the "Children of Adam." 
But here are things which, whether vessels of honor 
or dishonor, one does not care to have before him 
too often or too publicly, and which were unattractive 
to the pure and temperate seer, whose race had so 
long inhabited the clean-swept keeping-rooms of the 
land of mountain breezes and transparent streams. 
The matter was one of artistic taste and of the incli- 
nations of Emerson's nature, rather than of prudery 
or censorship. 

As for his own style, Emerson was impressed in 
youth by the free-hand manner of the early drama- 
tists, whom he read with avidity. He soon formed his 
characteristic measure, varying with " sixes," " sevens," 



THE LA TER POEMS. 



167 



and "eights," resembling Ben Jonson's lyrical style, 
but even more like that of Milton, Marvell, and other 
worthies of the Protectorate. In spirit and imagery, 
in blithe dithyrambic wisdom, he gained much from 
his favorite Orientals — Saadi and Hafiz. One stately 
and various measure he rarely essayed, but showed 
that it was well suited to his genius. In " Musketa- 
quid " and " Sea-Shore " we see the aptness of his ear 
and hand for blank verse. The little poem of "Days," 
imitated from the antique, is unmatched, outside of 
Landor, for compression and self-poise : — 

" Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days, 
MufHed cind dumb Hke barefoot dervishes, 
And marching single in an endless file, 
Bring diadems and fagots in their hands. 
To each they ofter gifts after his will, 
Bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky that holds them all. 
I, in my pleached garden, watched the pomp, 
Forgot my morning wishes, hastily 
Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day 
Turned and departed silent. I, too late, 
Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn." 

We could wish that Emerson had Avritten more 
blank verse, — a measure suited to express his highest 
thought and imagination. Probably, however, he said 
all tliat he had to say in verse of any kind. He was 
not one to add a single line for the sake of a more 
iberal product. 

He is thought to have begun so near the top that 
there was little left to climb. None of his verse is 
more pregnant than that which came in the first glow^, 
but the later poems are free from those grotesque 
sayings which illustrate the fact that humor and a 
lively sense of the absurd often are of slow develop- 
ment in the brain of an earnest thinker. There was, 
it must be owned, a tinge of provincial arrogance. 



'Days." 



Changes tn. 
style. 



i68 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 



" The 
S phi fix " 
again. 



Strength 

and 

•weakness 

of tran- 

scetidental 

v.^se. 



and there were expressions little less than ludicrous, 
in his early defiance of usage. He was too sincere 
a personage to resort to the grotesque as a means of 
drawing attention. Of him, the leader, this at least 
could not be suspected. Years afterward he revised 
his poems, as if to avoid even the appearance of af= 
fectation. On the whole, it is as well that he left 
"The Sphinx" unchanged; that remarkable poem is 
a fair gauge of its author's traits. The opening is 
strongly lyrical and impressive. The close is the 
flower of poesy and thought The general tone is 
quaint and mystical. Certain passages, however, like 
that beginning "The fiend that man harries," are cu- 
riously awkward, and mar the effect of an original, 
almost an epochal, poem. This would not be ad- 
mitted by the old-fashioned Emersonian, — never, by 
any chance, a poet pure and simple, — who makes it 
a point of faith to defend the very passages where 
the master nods. Just so the thick-and-thin Brown- 
ingite, who testifies his adoration by counting the 
m' s and Ji^s of the great dramatist's volumes, and 
who, also, never is a poet pure and simple, celebrates 
Mr. Browning's least poetic experiments as his mas- 
terpieces. I think that the weakness of " transcen- 
dental " art is as fairly manifest in Emerson's first 
and chief collection of verse as were its felicities, — 
the former belonging to the school, the latter to the 
seer's own genius. Poe, to whom poetry was solely 
an expression of beauty, was irritated to a degree not 
to be explained by contempt for all things East. He 
extolled quaintness, and justly detested obscurity. He 
was prejudiced against the merits of such poets as 
Channing and Cranch by their prophetic bearing, 
which he berated soundly as an effort to set up as 
poets " of unusual depth and very remarkable powers 



SELF-CRITICISM. 



169 



Poe on this 
school. 



Philo- 
sophic 
" intoxi' 
catiori.'''* 



of miiul." Admitting the grace of one, he said that it 
was "laughable to see that the transcendental poets, 
if beguiled for a minute or two into respectable Eng- 
lish and common-sense, are always sure to remem- 
ber their cue just as they get to the end of their 
song, and round oil with a bit of doggerel." Their 
thought was the "cant of thought," in adopting which 
" the cant of phraseology is adopted at the same 
time." This was serviceable criticism, ct ab /lostc, 
though Poe's lack of moral, and keenness of artistic, 
sense made him too sure of the insincerity of those 
who place conviction above expression. And Mr. 
James sees that Emerson's philosophy was " drunk 
in by a great many fine moral appetites with a sense 
of intoxication." The seer himself was intoxicated at 
times, and spoke, like the hasheesh-eaters, with what 
then seemed to him music and sanity. In a more 
reflecting season he excluded from his select edition 
certain pieces from which too many had taken their 
cues, — for example, the " Ode " to W. H. Channing, 
"The World-Soul," and "Tact." The Ode begins 
finely with a manner caught from Ben Jonson's ode 
" To Himself," and we can ill spare one passage 
("The God who made New Hampshire"); but was 
it the future compiler of " Parnassus " who preceded 
this with laughter-stirring rhymes, and shortly avowed 
that " Things are of the snake," and again that 
" Things are in the saddle. And ride mankind " .'' 
Well, he lived to feel that to poets, "of all men, the 
severest criticism is due," and that " Poetry requires 
that splendor of expression which carries with it the 
proof of great thoughts." 

But the forte of bardlings is the foiule of a bard. Ettterson 
Emerson became his own censor, and did wisely and'/'V^'^,. 

' -' I best critic. 

well. We have seen that his art, even now^ upon its 



70 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 



Essay on 
Art. 



Its chief 
xanon. 



constructive side, must often seem defective, — unsat- 
isfactory to those whose love of proportion is a moral 
instinct. Many poets and critics will feel it so Tht 
student of Emerson learns that he, loo, moved upon 
their plane, but would not be confined to it. More 
than other men, he found himself a vassal of the un- 
written law, whether his impulse lifted him above, or 
sent him below, the plane of artistic expression. If 
he could not sustain the concert-pitch of his voice at 
his best, he certainly knew what is perfection, and said 
of art much that should be said. He was not, he did 
not wish to be, primarily an artist : he borrowed Art's 
aid for his lofty uses, and held her at her worth. His 
essay on Art would be pronounced sound by a Goethe 
or a Lessing, though such men probe less deep for the' 
secret principle of things, and deal more featly with 
the exterior. Elsewhere he insists that we must " dis- 
abuse us of our superstitious associations with place 
and time, with number and size. . . . Where the heart 
is, there the muses, there the gods sojourn. ... A 
great man makes his climate genial in the imagina- 
tion of man, and its air the beloved element of all 
delicate spirits." And again (like Arnold) he speaks 
of the modernness of all good books : " What is well 
done, I feel as if I did ; what is ill done, I reck not 
of." He revised his prose less carefully, for republi- 
cation, than his verse, and doubtless felt surer of it. 
He himself would have been the first to declare, as 
to the discordant and grotesque portions oi' his verse 
or prose, that the thought was proportionately defec- 
tive, — not strong and pure enough to insure the beauty 
of the art which was its expression. Above all he 
knew, he confessed, that it is the first duty of a poet 
to express his thoughts naturally, counting among " the 
traits common to all works of the highest art, — that 



PROSE iVRIThXGS. 



171 



they are universally intelligible, that they restore to us 
the simplest states of niincl." This was his own canon. 
Where he failed of it, he might not surely know ; where 
he knew, there he rebuked himself. He struck out, in 
his self-distrust, many things of value to those who 
loved his verse. We dwell with profit on the fact that 
he retained so little that should be stricken out. 



V. 

It is but a foolish surmise w^hether Emerson's prose 
or verse will endure the longer, for they are of the 
same stuff, warp and woof, and his ideality crosses and 
recrosses each, so that either is cloth-of-gold. Of 
whichever a reader may first lay hold, he will be led 
to examine the whole fabric of the author's work. Few 
writers, any one of whose essays, met with for the first 
time, seems more like a revelation ! It will not be, I 
think, until that time when all his prose has passed 
into a large book, such as the volume we call Mon- 
taigne, that its full strength and importance can be 
felt. In certain respects it dwarfs other modern writ- 
ing, and places him among the great essayists. These 
are not the efforts of a reviewer of books or affairs, 
but chapters on the simplest, the greatest, the imme- 
morial topics, those that lie at the base of life and 
wisdom : such as Love, Experience, Character, Man- 
ners, Fate, Power, Worship — lastly. Nature herself, 
and Art her ideal counterpart. If to treat great themes 
worthily is a mark of greatness, the chooser of such 
themes begins with the instinct of great design. Ba- 
con's elementary essays excepted, there are none in 
English of which it can be more truly averred that 
there is nothing superfluous in them. Compare them 
with the rest in theme and method. Carlyle, outside 



His prose 
•writings. 



"■Nature;' 
1836. 



" Essays^' 
First 
Series^ 
1841. 



" Essays;' 
Second 
Series., 
1844. 



" Miscella- 
nies^' 



" Repre- 
sentative 
Men;' 
1850. 

" English 

Traits;' 

1856. 

" Conduct 

o/Li/e;^ 

i860. 



1/2 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 



" Society 
and Soli- 
tude,''^ 
J 870. 



" Letters 
attd Social 
A ims,''^ 
1876. 



His style. 



Apo- 
thegms, 



of " Sartor Resartus " and " Hero-Worship," usually 
reviews books, histories, individuals, at extreme length, 
and with dramatic comment and analysis. Emerson 
treats of the principles behind all history, and his 
laconic phrases are the very honey-cells of thought. 
There are let-downs and surplusage even in Landor. 
Throughout Emerson's writings each word is of value j 
they are the discourse of one who has digested all the 
worthy books, and who gives us their results, with 
latter-day discoveries of his own. He is the citizen of 
a new world, observing other realms and eras from an 
unrestricted point of view. 

The intent of our essayist is the highest, and by no 
means that of writing for the exercise or glory of au- 
thorship. "Fatal," he declares, "to the man of let- 
ters is the lust of display. ... A mistake of the main 
end to which they labor is incidental to literary men, 
who, dealing with the organ of language . . » learn to 
enjoy the pride of playing with this splendid engine, 
but rob it of its almightiness by failing to work with it." 
He estimates books at their worth. They " are for 
nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book 
than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my 
own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system." 

Thus the thought of Style, it may be, should enter 
into the mind of neither writer nor reader. Style makes 
itself, and Emerson's is the apothegmatic style of one 
bent upon uttering his immediate thoughts, — hence 
strong in sentences, and only by chance suited to the 
formation of an essay. Each sentence is an idea, an 
epigram, or an image, or a flash of spiritual light. His 
letters to Carlyle show that he was at one time caught 
by the manner of the author whose character, at leasts 
seemed of the most import to him. This was but a 
passing trace. When he was fresh from the schools, 



TERSE AND POETIC STYLE. 



^n 



his essays were structural and ordcrl)-, but more ab- 
stract than in latter years. During his mature and 
haply less spiritual period, had he cared to write a 
history, the English would have been pure English, 
the narrative racy and vigorous. Portions of the 
" English Traits " make this plain. Since De Foe, 
where have we found anything more idiomatic than his 
account of Wordsworth delivering a sonnet ? 

"This recitation was so unlocked for and surprising, — 
he, the old Wordsworth, standing apart, and reciting to me 
in a garden-walk, like a schoolboy declaiming, — that I at 
first was near to laugh ; but recollecting myself, that I had 
come thus far to see a poet, and he was chanting poems to 
me, I saw that he was right and I was wrong, and gladly 
gave myself up to hear." 

Note also Emerson's account of an ocean voyage. 
For charm of landscape-painting, take such a passage 
as that, in the second essay on Nature, beginning : 
"There are days which occur in this climate." But 
terseness is the distinctive feature of his style. "Men," 
he says, " descend to meet." "We are all discerners 
of spirits." " He [a traveller] carries ruins to ruins." 
No one has compressed more sternly the pith of his 
discourse. 

No poet, let us at once add, has written prose and 
shown more incontestably his special attribute. Emer- 
son's whole argument is poetic, if that work is poetic 
which reaches its aim through the analogies of things, 
and whose quick similitudes have the heat, the light, 
the actinism, of the day-beam, and of which the lan- 
guage is rhythmic without degeneracy, — clearly the 
language of prose, always kept from weakness by the 
thought which it conveys. No man's writing was more 
truly his speech, and no man's speech so rhythmic : 
"There are Muses in the woods to-day, and whispers 



Native 
English. 



Compres- 



The prose 
of a poet. 



174 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 



Rhythmic^ 
and full 
of noble 
imagery' 



to be heard in the breezes " ; and again, " Hawthorne 
rides well his horse of the night." As he spoke, so 
he wrote : " Give me health and a day, and I will 
make the pomp of emperors ridiculous " ; " The con- 
scious ship hears all the praise " ; of young idealists, 
"The tough world had its revenge the moment they 
put the horses of the sun to plough in its furrow " j 
of Experience, " was it Boscovich who found out that 
bodies never come in contact? Well, souls never 
touch their objects. An innavigable sea washes with 
silent waves between us and the things we aim at and 
converse with." In the same essay, — " Dream de- 
livers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. 
Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and as 
we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored 
lenses which paint the world their own hue." ^ And 
of Love's world, v/ith the cadences of Ecclesiastes, — 
" When the day was not long enough, but the night, 
too, must be consumed. . . . When the moonlight was 
a pleasing fever, and the stars were letters, and the 
flowers ciphers, and the air was coined into song; 
v/hen all business seemed impertinence, all the men 
and women running to and fro in the streets mere 
pictures." But to show the poetry of Emerson's prose 
is to give the whole of it ; these essays are of the few 
which make us tolerate the conceit of " prose poems." 
Their persistent recourse to imagery and metaphor, 
their suggestions of the secret relations of things, at 
times have subjected them to the charge of being ob- 
scure. The fault was not in the wine : — 

" Hast thou a drunken soul ? 
Thy bane is in thy shallow skull, not in my silver bowl !" 



l"Llfe, like a dome of many-colored glass, 
Stains the white radiance of eternity." 

Shelley's " Adonais." 



SECULAR ESSAYS, 



I D 



In mature years the essayist pays more regard to 
life about him, to the world as it is ; he is more equa- 
torial, less polar and remote. His insight betrays it- 
self in every-day wisdom. He is the shrewd, the be- 
nignant, the sagacious, Emerson, writing with pleasant 
aptitude, like Hesiod or Virgil, of domestic routine, 
and again of the Conduct of Life, of Manners, Be- 
havior, Prudence, Grace. This is in the philosophic 
order of progress, from the first principles to the ap- 
plication of them. Some of his followers, however, 
take him to task, unwilling that the master should 
venture beyond the glory of his cloud. As for his 
unique treatises upon Behavior, it was natural that he 
should be led to think upon that topic, since in gen- 
tle bearing, in his sweetness, persuasiveness, and 
charm of smile and voice, he was not excelled by any 
personage of our time, and what he said of it is of 
more value than the sayings of those w4io think such 
a matter beneath his regard. His views of civic duty 
and concerning the welfare of the Republic are the 
best rejoinder to his early strictures upon Homer and 
Shakespeare for the temporal and local features of 
their master-works. As a critic he was ever expect- 
ant, on the lookout for something good and new, and 
sometimes found the one good thing in a man or 
work and valued it unduly. When he made a com- 
plete examination, as in his chapter on Margaret Ful- 
ler, he excelled as a critic and delineator. Par- 
?iass2is is not judicial, but oddly made up of his own 
likings, yet the best rules of criticism are to be found 
in its preface. With the exception of " English 
Traits," he published no long treatise upon a single 
theme. His general essays and lectures, how^ever, 
constitute a treatise upon Man and Nature, and of 
themselves would serve as America's adequate con- 1 



See iJu 
" Coviplete 
IVorks,"" 

18S5. 



" Parnas- 
sus.,'''' 1874 



176 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 



Our most 
typical 
and inspir- 
ing poet. 



tribution to the English literature of his period. We 
are told of an unprinted series of his essays that may 
be grouped as a book on the Natural History of the 
Intellect. Should these see the light, it would be 
curious to compare them with the work of some pro- 
fessional logician — with the standard treatise of Pres- 
ident Porter, for instance — upon a similar theme. 
Something in quantity may yet be added to Emerson's 
literary remains. But it will not differ in quality ; 
we have had the gist of it : for he was a writer who, 
though his essays were the fruit of a prolonged life, 
never wrote himself out. Often an author has gained 
repute by one or two original works, while his ordi- 
nary efforts, if not devoted to learned or scientific re- 
search, have been commonplace. The flame of Emer- 
son's intellect never fades or flickers, and never irks 
us. It burns with elemental light, neither of artifice 
nor of occasion, serene as that of a star, and with an 
added power to heat the distance which receives it. 

VI. 

In summing up the traits of Emerson one almost 
ceases to be critical, lest the highest praise may not 
be quite undue. More than when Bion died, the 
glades and towns lament him, for he left no heir to 
the Muse which he taught his pupils. In certain re- 
spects he was our most typical poet, having the finest 
intuition and a living faith in it, — and because there 
was a sure intellect behind his verse, and because his 
influence affected not simply the tastes and emotions, 
but at last the very spirit, of his countrymen. He 
began where many poets end, seeking at once the 
upper air, the region of pure thought and ideality. 
His speech was wisdom, and his poesy its exhalation. 



FREE, TYPICAL A.\D IXSPIRING. 



177 



When he failed in either, it seemed to be through 
excess of divining. His triumphs were full of promise 
for those who dare to do their best. He was as far 
above Carlyle as the affairs of the soul and universe 
are above those of the contemporary, or even the 
historic, world. His problem, like that of Archimedes, 
was more than the taking of cities and clash of arms. 
The poet is unperturbed by temporal distractions ; yet 
poets and dreamers, concerned with the ideal, share 
in the world's battle equally with men of action and 
practical life. Only, while the latter fight on the 
ground, the idealists, like the dauntless ghosts of the 
Huns and Romans, lift the contest to the air. Emer- 
son was the freest and most ideal of them all, and 
w^hat came to him by inheritance or prophetic forecast 
he gave like a victor. He strove not to define the 
creeds, but to stimulate the intellect and purpose of 
those who are to make the future. If poetry be that 
which shapes and elevates, his own w^as poetry in- 
deed. To know^ the heart of New England you must 
hear the songs of his compeers ; but listening to those 
of Emerson, the east and west have yielded to the 
current of its soul. 

The supreme poet will be not alone a seer, but also 
a persistent artist of the beautiful. Of those who 
come before the time for such a poet is ripe, Long- 
fellow on the whole has done the most to foster the 
culture of poetry among us as a liberal art. Emerson 
has given us thought, the habit of thinking, the will 
to think for ourselves. He drained the vats of poli- 
tics and philosophy, for our use, of all that was sweet 
and fructifying, and taught his people self-judgment, 
self-reliance, and to set their courses by the stars. 
He placed chief value upon those primitive laws 
which are the only sure basis of national law and let- 
12 



Einerson 
and Long- 
fellow. 



178 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 



" A poet 
hidden in 
the light of 
thought.'''' 



" Unbod- 
ied joy y 



ters. And as a poet, his verse was the sublimation 
of his rarest mood, that changed as water into cloud, 
catching the first beams of sunrise on its broken 
edges, yet not without dark and vaguely blending 
spots between. Emerson and Longfellow came at the 
parting of the ways. They are of the very few whom 
we now recognize as the true founders of an American 
literature. No successors with more original art and 
higher imagination can labor to more purpose. If the 
arrow hits its mark, the aim was at the bowstring; 
the river strengthens and broadens, but the sands of 
gold wash down from near its source. 

Not a few are content with that poetry which re- 
turns again and again to its primal conceptions, yet 
suggests infinite pathways and always inspires, — the 
poetry of a hermitage whose Lar is Nature, and whose 
well-spring flows with clear and shining Thought. To 
such, — who care less for sustained flights of objective 
song, who can withdraw themselves from passion and 
dramatic life, who gladly accept isolated cadences and 
scattered, though exquisite, strains of melody in lieu 
of symphonic music " wandering on as loth to die," — 
Emerson will seem the most precious of our native 
poets. He will not satisfy those who look for the 
soul incarnate in sensuous and passionate being. 
Such readers, with Professor Dowden, find him the 
type of the New World transcendentalist, the creature 
of the drying American climate, one " whose nervous 
energy has been exalted," so " that he loves light 
better than warmth." He is not the minstrel for 
those who would study men in action and suffering, 
rather than as heirs to knowledge and the raptured 
mind. He is not a warrior, lover, raconteur, drama- 
tist, but an evangelist and seer. The greatest poet 
must be all in one, and I have said that Emerson 



A FOJ^EKL'A.XEK. 



179 



was among the foremost to a\-o\v it. ^Modern \y.\Tds^ Emerson'i 
poorly satisfy him. being meagre of design, and fail- ^"""P^'"" 
ing to guide and console. Wordsworth was an ex- future 
ception, yet he had '' written longer than he was ^"'^'^' 
inspired." Tennyson, wiih all his tune and color, 
"climbs no mount of vision." Even Shakespeare was 
too traditional, though one learns froni him that "tra- 
dition supplies a better fable than any invention can." 
In face of the greatest he felt that " the world still 
wants its poet-priest, a reconciler, who shall not trifle 
with Shakespeare the player, nor shall grope in graves 
with Swedenborg the mourner ; but who shall see, 
speak, and act with equal inspiration." Thus clearly 
he conceived of the poet's office, and equally was he 
assured that he himself was not, and could not be, 
the perfect musician. He chose the part of the fore- 
runner and inspirer, and when the true poet shall 
come to America, it will be because such an one as 
Emerson has gone before him and prepared the way 
for his song, his vision, and his recognition. 



CHAPTER VI. 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 



Fortunate 
in life and 
death. 



His mis- 
sion apos- 
iolic. 



I. 

OUR poet of grace and sentiment left us in the af- 
ter-glow of an almost ideal career. He had lived 
at the right time, and with the gift of years ; and he 
died before the years came for him to say, I have no 
pleasure in them. Not all the daughters of music 
were brought low. He scarcely could have realized 
that people were calling his work elementary, that 
men whose originality had isolated them, like Emer- 
son and Browning, — and even metrical experts, the 
inventors of new modes, — were gaining favor with a 
public which had somewhat outgrown him ; that he 
was to be slighted for the very qualities which had 
made him beloved and famous, or that other quali- 
ties, too long needed, were to be overvalued as if 
partly for the need's sake. 

But they are wrong who make light of Longfellow's 
service as an American poet. His admirers may form 
no longer a critical majority, yet he surely helped to 
quicken the New World sense of beauty, and to lead 
a movement which precedes the rise of a national 
school. I think that the poet himself, reading his 
own sweet songs, felt the apostolic nature of his mis- 
sion, ■ — that it was religious, in the etymological sense 
of the word, the binding back of America to the Old 
World taste and imagination. Our true rise of Poe- 



CHARM OF JIIS EARLY WORK 



i8i 



try may be dated from Loni;fello\v's method of excit- 
'wvz, an interest in it, as an expression of beauty and 
feeling, at a time when his countrymen were ready 
for something more various and human than the cur- 
rent meditations on nature. It was inevitable that 
he should first set his face toward a light beyond the 
sea, and I have said that his youthful legend aptly 
was Outre Mcr. An escape was in order from the as- 
ceticism which two centuries had both modified and 
confirmed. How could this be effected } Not at once 
by the absolute presentation of beauty. A Keats, 
pledged to this alone, could not have propitiated the 
ancestral spirit. Puritanism was opposed to beauty 
as a strange god, and to sentiment as an idle thing. 
Longfellow so adapted the beauty and sentiment of 
other lands to the convictions of his people, as to 
beguile their reason through the finer senses, and 
speedily to satisfy them that loveliness and righteous- 
ness may go together. His poems, like pictures seen 
on household walls, were a protest against barrenness 
and the symptoms of a new taste. 

They made their way more readily, also, by their 
response to the inherited Anglo - Saxon instincts of 
his own region. His early predilections, strengthened 
during a stay in Germany, were chiefly for the poe- 
try and rohiance of that land. He read his heart in 
its songs, which he so loved to translate for us. A 
new generation may be at a loss to conceive the 
effect of Longfellow's work when it first began to ap- 
pear. I may convey something of this by what is at 
once a memory and an illustration. Take the case of 
a child whose Sunday outlook was restricted, in a de- 
caying Puritan village, to a wooden meeting-house of 
the old Congregational type. The interior — plain, col- 
orless, rigid with dull white pews and dismal galleries 



Effect cf 

his early 
works. 



\ A charm 
I recalled 

and illits- 

trated. 



l82 



.HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 



fits genius 
ttot crea- 
tive^ but 
the/os- 
terer of 
taste and 
ideality. 



— increased the spiritual starvation of a young na« 
ture unconsciously longing for color and variety. 
Many a child like this one, on a first holiday visit 
to the town, seeing the vine-grown walls, the roofs 
and arches, of a graceful Gothic church, has felt a 
sense of something rich and strange ; and many, now 
no longer children, can remember that the impres-= 
sion upon entrance was such as the stateliest cathe- 
dral now could not renew. The columns and tinted 
walls, the ceiling of oak and blue, the windows of 
gules and azure and gold, — the service, moreover, 
with its chant and organ-roll, — all this enraptured and 
possessed them. To the one relief hitherto afforded 
them, that of nature's picturesqueness, — which even 
Calvinism endured without compunction, — was added 
a new joy, a glimpse of the beauty and sanctity of hu- 
man art. A similar delight awaited the first readers of 
Longfellow's prose and verse. Here was a painter and 
romancer indeed, who had journeyed far and returned 
with gifts for all at home, and who promised often and 

again to 

= " sing a more wonderful song 

Or tell a more marvellous tale." 

And thus it chanced that, well as he afterward sang 
of his own sea and shore, he now is said to have 
been the least national of our poets. His verse, it is 
true, was like a pulsatory cord, sustaining our new- 
born ideality with nourishment from the mother-land, 
until it grew to vigor of its own. Yet he was more 
widely read than his associates, and seemed to for- 
eigners the incumbent American laureate. His native 
themes, like some of Tennyson's, were chosen with 
deliberation and as if for their availability. But from 
the first he was a poet of sentiment, and equally a 
craftsman of unerring taste. He always gave of his 



THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL, 



183 



best ; neither toil nor trouble could dismay him until 
art had done its perfect work. It was a kind of gen- 
ius, — his sure perception of the fit and attractive. 
Love flows to one whose work is lovely. Besides, he 
was a devotee to one calling, — not a critic, journal- 
ist, lecturer, or man of affairs, — and even his prose 
romances were akin to poems. A long and spotless 
life was pledged to song, and verily he had his re- 
ward. Successors may find a weakness in his work, 
but who can rival him in bearing and reputation .-* 
His worldly wisdom was of the gospel kind, so gently 
tempered as to breed no evil. His life and works 
together were an edifice fairly built, — the House Beau- 
tiful, whose air is peace, where repose and calm are 
ministrant, and where the raven's croak, symbol of 
the unrest of a more perturbed genius, is never heard. 
Thus the clerkly singer fulfilled his office, — which 
was not in the least creative, — and had the tributes 
he most desired : love and honor during his life-time, 
and the assurance that no song of his took flight but 
to rest again and again "in the heart of a friend." 

II. 

Poets, like the cicalas, have occasion to envy those 
who compass their song and sustenance together. 
Few can pledge with Longfellow their lives, or even 
frequent hours, to the labor they delight in. There 
was, in fact, an "opening," — a need for just the ser- 
vice he could render. The circumstances of his birth 
and training were propitious and worked to one end. 
Neither he nor Hawthorne was the mere oft'spring of 
an environment. There was nothing special in the 
little down-east school of Bowdoin, sixty years ago, to 
breed the leaders of our imaginative prose and verse. 



A n atispi- 
cious time. 



1 84 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 



Henry 

Wads- 
ivorth 
L 07igfel- 
loiv : born 
in Port- 
land^ Me., 
Feb. 27, 
1807. 



" Coplas 
de Man- 
^ique,''"' 
833. 



But the time was ripe ; there was an unspoken de- 
mand for richer life and thought, to which such na- 
tures, and the intellects of Channing and Emerson, 
were sure to respond. And the concurrence certainly 
was special : that Longfellow, descended from Pilgrim 
and Puritan stock, the child of a cultured household^ 
should be born not only with a poet's voice and ear, 
but with an aptitude for letters amounting to a sixth 
sense, — a bookishness assimilative as that of Hunt 
or Lamb ; that he should be reared in a typical East- 
ern town, open alike to polite influences and to the 
freshness and beauty of the northern sea ; that such 
a youth, buoyant and manly, but averse to the coarser 
sports, gentle, pure, — one who in France would have 
become at first an abbe, — should in New England 
be made a college professor at nineteen, and commis- 
sioned to visit Europe and complete his studies ; that 
ten years later, having ended the pleasant drudgery 
of his apprenticeship, he should find himself settled 
for life at Harvard, the centre of learning, and under 
few obligations that did not assist, rather than im- 
pede, his chosen ministry of song. Here he was to 
have health, friendship, ease, the opportunity for travel, 
abundant and equal work and fame, with scarcely an 
abrupt turn, or flurry, or drought or storm, to the very 
end. Even his duties served in the direction of a 
literary bent, confirming his mastery of languages 
whose poetry and romance were his treasure-house. 
He wrote his text-books at an age when most poets 
go a-gypsying. When twenty-six, he made his trans- 
lation of the " Coplas de Manrique," — a rendering 
so grave and sonorous that, if now first printed, it 
would be caught up -like FitzGerald's " Rubaiyat of 
Omar," instead of going to the paper mill. It indi« 
cated, more than his original work of this period, that 



PROSE ROMANCES. 



185 



a true poetic method was forming in a country where 
Berkeley's muse thus far had made no course of em- 
pire. A few essays, ahva}'s on Hterature or the hm- 
guages, complete the round of his miscellanies, the 
last being contributed to a review in 1840. After 
that time he gave up all critical writing whatsoever. 

Oiitre-Mcr^ a young poet's sketch-book, reports his 
first transition from cloister life to travel and expe- 
rience. It is a journey of sentiment, if not a senti- 
mental journey, and made in the blithesome spirit of 
a troubadour. All the world was Arcady, — a land 
of beauty and romance ; and these he found, caring 
for nothing else, in sunny nooks of France, Italy, and 
Spain, as deftly as the botanist picks out his ferns 
and forest flowers. Our poet's herbarium had a gift 
to keep its blossoms unfaded. His road-glasses illu- 
minate the wayside : our modern travellers use stronger 
lenses, and see things through and through, but with 
the old illusions we have lost the best of all things 
— zest. Hyperion showed what changes four years 
can bring about while still the man is young : it is 
the thoughtful, and somewhat too fond, fantasy of 
the same pilgrim after more knowledge of the verities 
of life. The atmosphere of this book is that of Swit- 
zerland and Germany ; but its shadows came from the 
maker's heart. He had been bereaved. The opening 
phrase is grief, a poet's grief, that consoles itself with 
imagery : " The setting of a great hope is like the 
setting of the sun. . . . We look forward into the 
coming lonely night. The soul withdraws into itself. 
Then stars arise, and the night is holy." This pre- 
cise, epicurean touch, the application of art to feeling,* 
was new in our authorship. Void of real anguish or 
passion, it still suggested an ideal, — a purpose be- 
yond mere book-craft. The sketches, diversified with. 



Works in 
prose : 
" Ot^ire- 
Mer;' 
1835. 



" Hyfieru 
Ofi,'''' 1839. 



1 86 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 



Influence 
of Richter 
andHeine. 



'' The 
Scroll of 



not too frequent musing, the wedding of sound to 
sense, the daintiness of words, the feeble plot, all bear 
witness that " Hyperion " is the work of an idyllist. 
The vague manner, with its impression of rest sought 
in restlessness, and even the broken story, were bor- 
rowed, doubtless, from " Titan." The book naturally 
became the companion of all romantic pilgrims of the 
Rhine, for the true German spirit is here ; its senti- 
ment and fancy alike are seized by a master of the 
picturesque. He " knew the beauteous river all by 
heart, — every rock and ruin, every echo, every le- 
gend. The ancient castles, . . . they were all his ; 
for his thoughts dwelt in them, and the wind told him 
tales." With Jean Paul we have Heine, also, who 
might have conceived the grotesque episode of Frau 
Kranich's " tea " in Ems. The romance and spoon- 
ing of " Hyperion," and its moral conclusions, are 
food for adolescents ; but it is easier to laugh at 
youth than to possess it. And this is Longfellow's 
youth throughout, — the frankest of confessions. Paul 
Flemming "buried himself in books; in old dusty 
books." Read the list of them, from the Nibelun- 
genlied down, and see the diet that he garnished with 
grapes and Liebfrauenmilch and love-making and 
moonlight dreams. " How beautiful it is to love ! " 
Ah ! how happy to be young, and in love ; to have 
known sorrow, and to use it as a foil ; to visit and 
read the great world, yet not to be corrupted by it, 
still to keep a pure heart that has no taste for reck- 
lessness and vice ; through all to recall one lesson : 
" Look not mournfully into the Past. It comes not 
back again. Wisely improve the Present. It is thine. 
Go forth to meet the shadowy Future, without fear, 
and with a manly heart." 

The chief import of the poet's romances was their 



A BORN ROMAXTICIST. 



187 



bearing upon his own purpose. He fixed his rules of 
life by writing them clown. His second maxim is 
found in Kavanag/i, a tale with less freshness than 
"■ Hyperion,'* but fashioned with the hand of greater 
mastery, that of a writer in his prime. Its person- 
ages are more distinctly drawn, and it was his brief 
and nearest approach to a novel. We have a tran- 
script of New England village life, an atmosphere of 
breeding and refinement, and some pertinent criticism 
on literary and social topics. As before, the gist of 
the tale is in a text, placed, with due regard to con- 
vention, at the beginning : — 

" The flighty purpose never is o'ertook 
Unless the deed go with it." 

This bit of wisdom had been deeply considered by the 
author. By way of strengthening himself against a 
dreamer's temptation to be derelict, he worked it, one 
might say, into this " sampler " of a tale. Those who 
are fond of citing the formula, that genius is only a 
talent for persistent work, have reason to place our 
poet well in the van of their examples. Yet I fancy 
that only men of talent will heartily subscribe to this 
definition. Be this as it may, Longfellow's prose tales 
show us his equipment, and give the clew to his well- 
adjusted life. It was plain, also, that he was a born 
romanticist, in full sympathy with the German school. 
We shall see that, as a poet, he followed a romantic 
method, to the disapproval of those who feel that 
nothing in the New World should be done as it has 
been done elsCAvhere. It is difficult, however, to ex- 
plain why even things at home should not be treated 
according to the genius of the designer. After strange 
experiments, we just now are discovering that the 
colonial architecture, so much like that of Cromwell's 



The poet'' s 
rules 0/ 
li/e. 

" Kava- 
7111 gh^'''' 

1849. 



Romantic 
tendency. 



i88 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 



Poetical 
works. 



" Voices 
of the 
Night,'' 
1839. 



Foreign 
infiuences- 



England, is of all our styles the best adapted to the 
Atlantic States j and it still becomes us to be modest 
in defining the types that American art and poetry 
finally will assume. The critical question, I take it, 
is not what fashion should be outlawed, but whether 
the thing done is good of its kind. 

Nothing afterward tempted Longfellow from poetic 
composition, except the illustrations of the Poetry of 
Europe, many of which were his own translations, and, 
late in life, the diversion of editing Poems of Places, 
and the heroic labor of his complete version of " The 
Divine Comedy," a work to which I shall refer again, 

III. 

Longfellow's juvenile poems have been collected 
recently. Those printed, before his graduation, in 
" The Literary Gazette," resemble the verse of Bryant 
and Percival, the former of whom he looked upon as 
his master. Tracings of browsing in the usual pas- 
ture grounds are strangely absent : I sometimes won- 
der if he had an early taste for the Elizabethan poets, 
or, indeed, for any English worthy, since no modern 
author has shown fewer signs of this in youth. The 
Voices of the Night, his own first collection, was post- 
poned until after a long experience of translation and 
prose work. It appeared in his thirty-third year, and 
met with instant favor. Only nine new pieces were 
in the book; these, with the translations following, 
have characteristics that his verse continued to dis- 
play. The Prelude recalls that of Heine's third edi- 
tion "of the " Reisebilder" {Das ist der alte Mdrchen- 
wald), then just published. Later pieces show that 
Longfellow caught the manner of this poet, whose 
principles he severely condemned. The German's 



EARLY LYRICS AXD BALLADS. 



189 



rhythm and reverie were repeated in " The Day is 
Done," "The Bridge," "Twilight," etc., but not his 
passion and scorn. The influence of Uhhmd is equally 
manifest elsewhere. Prototypes of Longfellow's nia- 
turer work are found in " The Reaper," " The Psalm 
of Life," and ''The Beleaguered City." "The Mid- 
night Mass for the Dying Year," against which Poe 
brought a mincing charge of plagiarism, is as strong 
and conjuring as anything its author lived to write. 
The Translations deseryed high praise. The stately 
" Coplas " re-appears. Various renderings from Ger- 
man lyric poets, such as " The Happiest Land," " Be- 
ware," and " Into the Silent Land," were new origi- 
nals, examples of a talent peculiarly his own. Given 
a task which he liked, — with a pattern supplied by 
another, — and few could equal him. He made his 
copies in various measures and from many tongues. 
An essay in hexameter, the version of Tegner's " Chil- 
dren of the Lord's Supper," preceded his original 
poems in that form. Even after completing his 
" Dante," he loved to toy with such work. I have 
heard him say that he longed to make an English 
translation of Homer, upon the method which Voss 
had used to such advantage. 

His volume of 1841, Ballads and Other Poe7iis^ may 
be likened to Tennyson's volume of the ensuing 
year, in that it confirmed its author's standing and 
indicated the full extent of his genius as a poet. It 
was choice in its way, suggesting taste rather than 
fertility ; choicely presented, also, for with it came the 
fashion, new to this country, of printing verse at- 
tractively and in a shape that seeks the hand. The 
poet's matter, if often gleaned from foreign litera- 
tures, was novel to his readers, and his style distinct 
from that of any English contemporary. The book 



" Ballads 
and Other 
Poetns,'" 
1841. 

Cp. " Vic- 
torian 
Poets " ; 
//• 158- 
160. 



The poet'' s 
quality 
now ap- 
parent 



IQO 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, 



Lyrical 
homilies. 



Sentiment. 



Piciur- 
vsqueness. 



contains examples of all the classes into which his 
poems seem to divide themselves, and may be ex- 
amined with its successors. One sees, forthwith, that 
Longfellow's impulse was to make a poem, above all, 
interesting. He was no word-monger, no winder of 
coil upon coil about a subtle theme. He changed his 
topics, for some topic he must have, and one that 
suited him. A cheerful acceptance of the lessons of 
life was the moral, suggested in many lyrics, which 
commended him to all virtuous, home-keeping folk, 
but in the end poorly served him with the critics. 
He gained a foothold by his least poetic work, — verse 
whose easy lessons are adjusted to common needs ; 
by the "Psalm of Life," "Excelsior," "Prometheus," 
and "The Ladder of St. Augustine," — little sermons 
in rhyme that are sure to catch the ear and to be- 
come hackneyed as a sidewalk song. He often 
taught, by choice, the primary class, and the upper 
form is slow to forget it. Next above these pretty 
homilies are his poems of sentiment and twilight 
brooding. " The Reaper and the Flowers," " Foot- 
steps of Angels," " Maidenhood," " Resignation," and 
" Haunted Houses " came home to pensive and gen- 
tle natures. Lowell has written a few kindred pieces, 
such as " The Changeling " and " The First Snow- 
fall." A still higher class, testing Longfellow's eye 
for the suggestive side of a theme and his art to 
make the most of it, includes " The Fire of Drift- 
Wood," "The Lighthouse," "Sand of the Desert," 
" The Jewish Cemetery," and " The Arsenal." In 
poems of this sort he was a skilled designer, yet they 
were something more than art for art's sake. Owing 
to the tenderness seldom absent from his work, he 
often has been called a poet of the Affections. It 
must be owned that he was a poet of the Tastes as 



QUALITY OF HIS GENIUS. 



191 



well. He combined beauty with feeling in lyrical 
trifles which rival those of Tennyson and other mas- 
ters of technique, and was almost our earliest maker 
of verse that might be termed exquisite. " The Bells 
of Lynn" and "The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls," 
show that the hand which polished " Curfew " and 
" The Arrow and the Song " was sensitive to the 
last. 

Among obvious tests of a poet are his voice, facil- 
ity, and general aim. Longfellow's verse was refined 
and pleasing ; his purpose, evidently not that of a 
doctrinaire. The anti-slavery poems did not come, 
like Whittier's, from a fiery heart, or rival Lowell's in 
humor and disdain. They simply manifest his recog- 
nition and artistic treatment of an existing evil. The 
ballad of " The Quadroon Girl " is a poem, not a 
prophecy, with a pathos beautified by certain "values," 
as a painter might term them, — the tropic shore, the 
lagoon, the island planter's daughter and slave. Of 
the higher tests of poetic genius, — spontaneity, sweep, 
intellect, imaginative pow-er, — what examples has he 
left us } At times the highest of all, imagination, in 
passages where he foregoes the conceits and fancies 
that so possessed him. We have it in the " Midnight 
Mass"; in "Sir Humphrey Gilbert"; in "The Span- 
ish Jew's Tale," when 

" straight into the city of the Lord 

The Rabbi leaped with the Death-Angel's sword, 
And through the streets there swept a sudden breath 
Of something there unknown, which men call death." 



At times also we have what is of almost equal worth, 
imaginative treatment. This is felt in the effect of 
his very best lyrics, a series of ballads, with " The 
Skeleton in Armor " at their front both in date and in 
merit. This vigorous poem opens \vith a rare abrupt- 



Taste. 



Not a 

polemic 

reformer. 



Tests of 
genius. 



Itnagin- 
ative 
Ballads. 
" The 
Skeleton 
in A r- 
mor." etc. 



192 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 



Occasional 
PoetHS.^ 



ness. The author, full of the Norseland, was inspirited 
by his novel theme, and threw off a ringing carol of 
the sea-rover's training, love, adventure. The ca- 
dences and imagery belong together, and the m.eas- 
ure, that of Drayton's "Agincourt," is better than any 
new one for its purpose. Even the poet's conceits are 
braver than their wont : — ^ 

" Then from those cavernous eyes 
Pale flashes seemed to rise, 
As when the northern skies 

Gleam in December ; 
And, like the water's flow 
Under December's snow, 
Came a dull voice of woe 

From the heart's chamber." 

Elsewhere he is as resonant as the bard of England's 
*' King Harry " : — ■ 

" And as to catch the gale 
Round veered the flapping sail, 
Death ! was the helmsman's hail, 

Death without quarter ! 
Midships with iron keel 
Struck we her ribs of steel ; 
Down her black hulk did reel 

Through the black water ! " 

To old-fashioned people this heroic ballad, written 
over forty years ago, is worth a year's product of what 
I may term Kensington-stitch verse. A few others, 
mostly of the sea, count high in any estimate of Long- 
fellow. "The Wreck of the Hesperus," though not 
without blemishes, " Sir Humphrey Gilbert," " Victor 
Galbraith," and " The Cumberland " are treated, I 
think, imaginatively. Boker's noble stanzas on the 
sinking of the Cumberland follow more closely the old 
ballad style, but Longfellow plainly found a style of 
his own. His " occasional " poems were equally fe^ 



ARTISTIC GRACE. 



19. 



liciloLis : witness the touchin<j:, sympatlictic imagery of 
"The Two Angels," the joyous grace of the chanson 
for Agassiz's birthday. " Hawthorne," " Bayard Tay- 
lor," and " Killed at the Ford " are examples of the 
fitness with which his emotion and poetic quality cor- 
responded, each to each. But neither war nor grief 
e\'er too much disturbed the artist soul. Tragedy 
went no deeper with him than its pathos ; it was an- 
other element of the beautiful. Death was a luminous 
transition. "The Warden of the Cinque Ports " is all 
melody and association. He made a scenic threnody, 
knowing the laureate would supply an intellectual 
characterization of the Iron Duke. His fancy dwells 
upon the ancient and high-sounding title, the mist and 
sunrise of the Channel, and the rolling salute from all 
those rampart guns, that yet could not arouse the old 
Field-Marshal from his slumber. Tennyson fills his 
grander strophes with the sturdy valor and wisdom of 
the last great Englishman, but within our own poet's 
bounds the result is just as undeniably a poem. 

Longfellow, employing regular forms of verse, w^as 
flexible where many are aw^kward, — at ease in his fine 
clothes. " Rain in Summer," " To a Child," and a 
few longer poems yet to be examined, such as " The 
Building of the Ship," are WTitten with a free hand. 
In his latter period he often used an anapestic move- 
ment, first discoverable in " The Saga of King Olaf " 
and " Enceladus," afterward in " Belisarius," "The 
Chamber over the Gate," and " Helen of Tyre." The 
impression conveyed is that we listen to one whose 
day for elaborate song is past, but whose voice still 
w^arbles in the fresh break of spring or the melting 
twilight of thankfulness and rest. With age, his nat- 
ural tenderness grew upon him, as men's traits wdll for 
good and bad. " The Children's Hour " is one of the 



A vietri- 
cal expert 



194 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 



*' My Lost 
Youth.'' 



inimitable fireside songs that made this " old mous- 
tache " the children's poet. Another delightful lyric, 
" My Lost Youth," was the utterance of a man who 
in middle age looked in his own heart to write, and 
found it warm and true. To comprehend its charm 
and sincerity, one, perchance, must also have loitered 
in youth along the piers, sending his hopes far across 
the whispering ocean to the untried world ; must him- 
self remember 

" the black wharves and the slips, 

And the sea-tides tossing free ; 
And Spanish sailors with bearded lips, 
And the beauty and mystery of the ships. 

And the magic of the sea." 

Some breezy dome of trees, with sounds and shadows 
like those of Deering's woods, must still haunt his 
memory, if he would recall 

"The song and the silence in the heart, 
That in part are prophecies, and in part 
Are longings wild and vain ; 
And the voice of that fitful song 
Sings on, and is never still : 
* A boy's will is the wind's will, 
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.' " 

Of all these poems, the swallow-flights of many sea- 
sons, not one falls short of a certain standard of grace 
and correctness ; and the same may be said of the 
author's more pretentious works, to which we now 
come. Meanwhile it is to be noted that he was the 
first American to compose sustained narrative-poems 
that gained and kept a place in literature. In fact, 
since the Georgian period, there has been no other 
poet of our tongue, save Tennyson, whose longer pro. 
ductions have been greeted by the public with the 
interest bestowed upon the successive works of nov« 
elists in the front rank. 



EVANGELIXE. 



195 



IV. 

" Evangeline," the first of these tales in verse, 
was written — as I have said of " In Memoriam," 
that very different production — when its author had 
reached the age of forty, with his powers in full matu- 
rity, and it remains his typical poem. Like " Hermann 
and Dorothea," it is composed in hexameter, as befits 
a bucolic love story. Longfellow's choice of this meas- 
ure, in defiance of a noble army of censors, proves 
that he had, much as he shrank from discussion, the 
full courage of his convictions upon a point in literary 
art. He lived for poetry ; his tastes were definite, and 
he felt himself justified in respecting them. 

Within a recent period several noteworthy exten- 
sions have been made to the technical range of Eng- 
lish verse. Among these are : the use by Tennyson of 
the stanzaic form of " In Memoriam " ; the example 
of a long poem in unrhymed trochaics, by Longfellow ; 
Swinburne's forcible handling of anapestic measures ; 
more recently, the revival of elegant romance forms, 
by the new English school. Preceding these in date 
we have Longfellow's success in familiarizing the 
"English hexameter," the measure of "Evangeline" 
and "Miles Standish." The popularity of those idyls 
assuredly proved that the common folk, in spite of 
critics, do not find the verse a stumbling-block. They 
read it, when gracefully written, without suspecting that 
it is not a musical and natural English form. The 
question of hexameter has been argued to little pur- 
pose, in consequence of a mist which has hid the true 
issue from the perception of both parties to the dis- 
pute. The verse usually is examined, by its friends 
and opponents, from the scholar's point of view. 
To Mr. Swinburne, hexameters are " ugly bastards of 



Sustained 

■narrative 
poems. 



" Evange- 

line;' 

1S47. 



The qiies- 
tion of 
" English 
Hexame- 
ter '■> 
verse. 
Cp. " Vic- 
torian 
Poets " : 
p. 251. 



Wrongly 
argued., 
froin tJte 

scholar''s 
point of 



196 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 



King shy's 
*'' Andro- 
meda.'''' 



A wrong 
■premise. 



verse " ; even those of Mr. Arnold have " no metrical 
feet at all," but sound like " anapests broken up and 
driven wrong " ; dough's are admirable " studies in 
graduated prose " ; Hawtrey's " faultless, English, hex- 
ametrical," but only " a well-played stroke," not con- 
tinuable j Kingsley's " Andromeda," the " one good 
poem extant in that pernicious metre," and even 
Kingsley's feet are but " loose, rhymeless anapests." 
Now " Andromeda," a delicious poem for poets, never 
will commend its measure to the multitude, since it 
never will reach them. But if such lines as these, — 

" Far through the wine-dark depths of the crystal, the gardens 
of Nereus, 
Coral and sea-fan and tangle, the blooms and the palms of 
the ocean," 

are essentially anapestic, it is because one chooses to 
read them so ; and any dactylic verse of Homer may 
be transposed in the same way by reading it accentu- 
ally and ignoring the first and last syllables. When 
Mr. Swinburne adds, " Such as pass elsewhere for 
English hexameter, I do hope, are impossible to Eton," 
he strikes the key-note of the misunderstanding. The 
same premise is always implied, to wit : that classical 
analogies should govern our opinion of this measure. 
Unfortunately, I say, even the arguments of its de- 
fenders are based on the notion that the modern 
verse may approximate to the antique, in which effort, 
of course, it always must fail. Poe, in his turn, op- 
posed Longfellow's hexameters because they were not 
classical ; yet he unconsciously paid tribute to them as 
an English form of verse, when he said that their ad- 
mirers were " deceived by the facility with which some 
of these verses may be read ! " Lord Derby antici- 
pated Mr. Swinburne's "pernicious metre," in denounc- 



'ENGLISH HEXAMETER' VERSE 



197 



The real 
point at 



Views of 
otiicr 
frietids 
and oppo- 
tients. 



ing " that pestilent heresy of the so-called English 
hexameter," which " can only be pressed into the ser- 
vice by a violation of every rule of prosody." Whether 
or not the noble translator, deprived of rules of pros- 
ody, would have found it hard to write verse at all, 
it is plain that here again crops out the fallacy of the 
discussion. Fixed rules of quantitative or classical 
verse must be put out of mind. The question ought 
to be, simply : Is the verse, in six feet, of " Evange- 
line " or " Andromeda " a good and readable meas- 
ure for an English poem t 

Bryant, a good writer of blank verse, disliked a 
measure which he found un suited to his slow and dig- 
nified movement. Professor Lewis took the ground of 
Mr. Br}'ant, whose Homer he so much praised. Mr. 
Lang is on the same side, and has said that not even 
Professor Arnold can alter his opinion. Yet the late 
Professor Hadley, an almost matchless scholar, advo- 
cated this verse for Homeric translation. Messrs. 
Lowell, Higginson, and Stoddard are among its friends. 
Matthew Arnold, in the delightful papers " On Trans- 
lating Homer," has made his strongest plea for the 
English hexameter by unconsciously granting that its 
close approximation to the antique type must be the 
result of adroit labor, not of unstudied expression. 
Such a result justly might be deemed an artifice, dis- 
tinct from natural English verse. And Mr. Arnold, 
in view of the reception awarded " Evangeline," also 
sees that the dislike of our present English hexameter 
is "rather among the professional critics than the 
general public." A liking for it, on the part of many 
poets, is evident from their successive experiments. 
Longfellow's foreign studies influenced his own deci- 
sion in its favor ; since then we have had Kingsley's 
" Andromeda," Clough's "Bothie," Howells's "Clem- 



Arnold 
''On 
Trans- 
latin^^ 
Homer. " 



Recent 
poems in 
liexatne- 
I ter. 



198 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 



A ccent 
and qtiafv- 
tity. 



Ultimate 
character- 
istics. 
Cp. " Vic- 
torian 
Poets " : 
i- 251. 



ent," Taylor's rhythmic " Pastorals," and, more re- 
cently, Mr. Munby's idyl of " Dorothy " in the elegaic 
measure, and its Hellenic counter-type, the " Delphic 
Days " of Mr. Snider. But while there are both faith 
and practice in favor of the hexametric verse, it is still 
in a stage of growth. Mr. Arnold a second time reaches 
the mark when he implies that its capabilities are not 
yet evident ; that, " even now, if a version of the Iliad 
in English hexameter were made by a poet who, like 
Mr. Longfellow, has that indefinable quality which 
renders him popular, — - something attractive in his tal- 
ent which communicates itself to his verses, — it would 
have a great success among the general public." He 
expected yet to see an improved type of this verse, 
which should excel Voss's by as much as Shakespeare's 
blank verse excels that of Schiller. This may or may 
not be ; but the capabilities of the measure will not 
be understood until some fine poet — combining the 
simplicity of Longfellow and the vigor of Clough, and 
free from the sing-song of the one and the roughness 
of the other — shall m.ake it the vehicle of passion, 
incident, imagination. To bring out its full rhythm, 
while depending chiefly on accent, — the natural basis 
of English verse, — the ear will pay regard to such 
effects of quantity as the language proffers. Purely 
quantitative English verse, at any length, is out of the 
equation. To the samples of it often printed by ama- 
teurs in *' Blackwood " and elsewhere. Canning's out- 
burst, " Dactylics call'st thou them ? God help thee, 
silly one ! " may be justly applied, but not to the hex- 
ameter of Kingsley and Bayard Taylor. Call the new 
measure what you will — something else, if possible, 
than the term applied to the verse of Homer and Lu- 
cretius, for it assuredly is not composed of quantita' 
tive dactyls and spondees. But it will have six feet, 



A POPULAR TEST AND VERDICT. 



199 



and n.itural breaks and cnssuras, and will be more or 
less dactylic; it may also have anapestic variations, 
and trochees quite as often as spondees. To sum up 
all, its music, sweep, and inspiriting effect will depend 
entirely upon the genius of the poet who writes it. 

The use of this measure for translation from the 
Greek and Latin poets I have discussed in the chap- 
ter on Br}'ant. Longfellow could not be the supreme 
translator of Homer ; but if there was nothing of the 
Grecian in him, there was much of the Latinist, and 
with Virgil's polished muse he might have been quite 
at ease. Meanwhile, the popularity of our new hex- 
ameter with simple readers who know little of the 
Homeric roll, the Sicilian psithiirisma, or Virgil's liq- 
uid flow, has been demonstrated against all theorists 
by the record of " Evangeline." The poet's friends 
told him he must take a familiar metre, that hexame- 
ters "would never do." He found, as reported by 
David Macrae, tliat his " thoughts would run in hex- 
ameter," and declared that the measure would " take 
root in English soil." " It is a measure," he said, 
"that suits all themes. It can fly low like a swallow, 
and at any moment dart skyward. . . . What fine 
hexameters we have in the Bible : Ilusbajids, love your 
wii'cs, and be not bitter against them ; and this line, 
God is go?ie up with a shout, the Lord with the sotmd 
of a trumpet. Nothing could be grander than that!" 
Over-dactylic, and therefore monotonous, as Longfel- 
low's hexameters often are, they have the merit of 
being smooth to read, without analysis, like any other 
English verse. This primary, easy lilt was needed for 
an introduction, until, stage by stage, the popular ear 
should be wonted to more varied forms, and the 
scholar brou^rht to realize that here is a true and 
idiomatic English verse, however distinct from that 
which he learned in the classes. 



See pp. Sg- 
91. 



Popular 
success of 
Lotig/el- 
loiv's ex- 
perivient. 



200 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 



" Evan- 
^eline ■' 
the flower 
of A meri- 
can idyls. 



Notwithstanding its primitive and loose construc- 
tion, the verse of " Evangeline " is at times vigorously 
wrought and sonorous : — 

" Wild through the dark colonnades and corridors leafy the blast 
rang, 
Breaking the seal of silence, and giving tongues to the forest. 
Soundless above them the banners of moss just stirred to the 

music. 
Multitudinous echoes awoke and died in the distance, 
Over the watery floor, and beneath the reverberant branches." 

And with the measure that came to him, the poet 
had chanced upon an idyllic story, seemingly made 
for its use, and wholly after his liking. A beautiful, 
pathetic tradition of American history, remote enough 
to gather a poetic halo, and yet fresh with sweet hu- 
manities ; tinged with provincial color which he knew 
and loved, and in its course taking on the changing 
atmospheres of his own land ; pastoral at first, then 
broken into action, and afterward the'^'record of shift- 
ing scenes that made life a pilgrimage and dream. 
There are few dramatic episodes ; there is but one 
figure whom we follow, — that one the most touching 
of all, the betrothed Evangeline searching for her 
lover, through weary years and over half an unknown 
world. There are chance pictures of Acadian fields. 
New World rivers, prairies, bayous, forests, by moon- 
light and starlight and midday; glimpses, too, of pic- 
turesque figures, artisans and farmers, soldiery, trap- 
pers, boatmen, emigrants and priests. But the poem 
already is a little classic, and will remain one, just as 
surely as " The Vicar of Wakefield," " The Deserted 
Village," or any other sweet and pious idyl of our 
English tongue ; yet we find its counterpart more 
nearly, I think, in some faultless miniature of the 
purest French school. Evangeline, as she 



'HIAWATHA: 



201 



*' Sat by some lonely grave, and thouglU that perchance in its 
bosom 
He was already at rest, and she longed to slumber beside him," 

though the subject of artists, needs no other painter 
than lier poet, through whose verse the music of her 
name and the legend of her wanderings will be long 
perpetuated. There are flaws and petty fancies and 
homely passages in " Evangeline " ; but this one poem, 
thus far the flower of American idyls, known in all 
lands, I will not approach in a critical spirit. There 
are rooms in every house where one treads with soft- 
ened footfall. Accept it as the poet left it, the mark 
of our advance at that time in the art of song, — his 
own favorite, of which he justly might be fond, since 
his people loved it with him, and him always for its 
sake. 

The advantage of a new field, to which later au- 
thors, like Harte and Cable, are somewhat indebted, 
was of full service to our poet, not only on his pro- 
vincial excursions, but also in the one successful at- 
tempt that has been made to treat in numbers the 
customs and legends of our Indian tribes. This gain 
was strengthened by the novelty of the rhymeless tro- 
chaic dimeter used for Hia^vat/ia, a measure then 
practically unknown to English verse. He probably 
would not have ventured to compose his Algic Edda 
in this monotonous time-beat, had he not made sure 
of its eftect in older literatures, and mainly, as was 
noted at the time, in the Finnish epic of " Kalevala." 
The result, on the whole, justified his course. " Hia- 
watha " is a forest-poem ; it is fragrant with the woods, 
fresh with the sky and waters of the breezy north. 
The Indian traditions, like those of Finland, are the 
myths of an untutored race ; they would seem puerile 
and affected in any but the most primitive of chant- 



" The 
Son£- of 
Hiawa- 
tha,''^ 1855. 



Its meas- 
ure- 



202 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 



First suc- 
cessful 
treatment 
of the In- 
dian le- 
gends. 



ing measures. As it is, one feels that the nicest skill 
was required to protect the verse from gathering an 
effect of burlesque or commonplace ; yet this it never 
does. The fable is not of a stimulating kind. Grown- 
up readers, I suspect, seldom go through it consecu- 
tively. To read here and there and at odd times, it 
is in every way pleasurable. It was, in a sense, the 
poet's most genuine addition to our native literature„ 
Previous endeavors to make imaginative verse from 
aboriginal material had signally failed : witness the 
ludicrous heroics of the Knickerbocker poets, whose 
conventional ideals were utterly discarded by Long- 
fellow. He alone had the gift to blend the kindred 
myths of Indian fancy in mellow and artistic simplic- 
ity; to cull from Schoolcraft what was really essential, 
and make it more charming for us than a sheer in- 
vention possibly could be. He made the field his 
own, with little room for after-comers. " Hiawatha " 
is the one poem that beguiles the reader to see the 
birch and ash, the heron and eagle and deer, as they 
seem to the red man himself, and to join for the mo- 
ment in his simple creed and wonderment. Such is 
the half-dramatic merit of the work, and it was only 
by a true exercise of the imagination that a poet, 
himself no familiar of the wild-wood life, could sit in 
his study and utilize the books relating to it : an 
equally true exercise, I think, though upon a less ma- 
jestic basis, with that of the poet who mastered the 
Arthurian legends of his own historic race and island, 
and wrote the " Idylls of the King." Longfellow's 
use of the Indian dialect and names is delightful. 
These cantos remind us that poetry is the natural 
speech of primitive races ; the " song " of Hiawatha 
has the epic quality that pertains to early ballads. 
the highest enjoyment of which belongs to later ages 



* COURTSHIP OF MILES STANDISH: 



20 



and to the creature that Whitman terms the civilizee. 
He alone can rehsh to the full the illusions which 
the poet has recaptured for his episode of " The 
Building of the Canoe," the death of Minnehaha, and 
Hiawatiia's mystical farewell. 

When a companion-piece to " Evangeline " appeared, 
every one made haste to acquaint himself with the 
love experience of the demure Priscilla, loyal John 
Alden, and bluff Captain Miles. Even now, if we 
had some young Tennysons and Longfellows, poetic 
ideals might not wholly give way to the novelist's pho- 
tographs of every-day life. The author's tact guided 
him to the prettiest tradition of Pilgrim times. We 
have a romantic picture of the Plymouth settlement, 
with its far-away round of human life and action, 
through which the tide of love went flowing then as 
now^ The bucolic wedding-scene at the close is a 
fine subject for the pastoral canvas. The Courtship 
of Miles StandisJi was an advance upon ''Evangeline," 
so far as concerns structure and the distinct charac- 
terization of personages. A merit of the tale is the 
frolicsome humor here and there, lighting up the gloom 
that blends with our conception of the Pilgrim inclos- 
ure, and we see that comic and poetic elements are 
not at odds in the scheme of a bright imagination. 
The verse, though stronger, is more labored than that 
of " Evangeline " ; some of the lines are prosaic, al- 
most inadmissible. There are worse, however, in the 
poet's last example of hexameter, the Quaker story of 
"Elizabeth," — which was written rather to fill out the 
" Tales of a Wayside Inn " than from any special in- 
spiration. Nor does the Plymouth idyl show much 
sympathy on the part ot the author with the ancestral 
environment, but chiefly a cavalier perception of what 
romance and grace there might have been in the good 
old colony time. 



" The 
Courtship 
of Miles 
Standish^' 
iSsS. 



204 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 



Longfel- 
low'' s dra- 
?iiatic 
foems. 



" The 
Spanish- 
Student^'' 
1843- 



Various 
weak 

andfaulty 
dramas. 



C{>. " Vic- 
torian 
Poets " ; 
i>P. 189, 

''-90) 413 ; 



His works in dramatic form plainly represent the 
craving of a versatile poet to win laurels in every 
province of his art. But to compose a living drama 
requires just that special faculty^ if not the highest, 
which is denied to nine out of ten. Longfellow, per- 
chance, might have made himself either a dramatist 
or a novelist, if he had gone into training as dog- 
gedly as others, born essayists or poets, who have 
gained the secret of novel-writing through practice, 
aided by popular encouragement. He made a fair 
beginning as a romancer with "Hyperion," and even 
as a dramatist by the clever play of The Spanish Stu- 
de?it^ -— equipped with the properties of a country and 
literature so well understood by him. As a drama, 
that remains his best achievement. When the desire 
to better it possessed him, the outcome was a motley 
series of writings in the form under review: one, a 
frigid contribution to the pseudo-antique verse at which 
all college-bred poets feel competent to try their hands. 
Nothinp- with the true Grecian flavor could come out 
of his Italian and Gothic tendencies. Pandora, be- 
sides reminding us of Taylor's version of the Second 
Part of Faust, is in every way a forced effort, and, 
like "Judas Maccabaeus," would go a-begging if the 
work of a new man. The Trilogy of Christus, as a 
whole, is a disjointed failure. Parts First and Third, 
"The Divine Tragedy," and "The New England Trag- 
edies," exhibit the skill to choose imposing subjects 
and build a framework, but little of the power re- 
quired for their treatment. We have the form, the 
personages, and situations, rarely the action and noble 
fire. The author's shortcomings are even more con- 
spicuous than Tennyson's, and by as much as his in^ 
tellectual power was the less absolute. His theory 
that the Scriptural language should be reproduced 



* THE GOLDEN LEGEND: 



20: 



grew out of the fact that he could invent no other, 
and resulted in a barren paraphrase of what is fine 
in its own place. What sublime themes ! — the life 
and passion of Christ, the Golden Legend of Chris- 
tendom, tiie tragedy of Puritan superstition, — and 
how tamely the first and last of these are handled ! 
Their consolidation was manifestly an after-thought, 
to give a semblance of strength to the whole. Where 
we have the poet's own style, as in the soliloquies of 
Mary, Simon, Helen, it is a subjective utterance of 
the Cambridge scholar at his desk. The Interludes 
are put in to brace the effect, like the sham but- 
tresses of a faulty building. He should not have pre- 
empted the sable field of the Quaker and witch per- 
secutions, unless he felt in his. utmost fibre the nerve 
to occupy it. The temptation was strong ; the result, 
contrasted with Haw^thorne's prose treatment of kin- 
dred subjects, is deplorable. 

The Golde?i Legend, however, should be judged by 
itself, and is an enchanting romance of the Middle 
Age cast in the dramatic mould. Brought out years 
before the " Tragedies," it finally was merged in the 
" Christus " by way of toning up the whole, the poet 
well knowing that this was his choicest distillation of 
Gothic mysticism and its legendary. It is composite 
rather than inventive ; the correspondences between 
this work and Goethe's masterpiece, not to speak of 
productions earlier than either, are interesting. There 
is decided originality in its general effect, and in the 
taste wherewith the author, like a modern maker of 
stained glass, arranged the prismatic materials which 
he knew precisely where to collect. The Prologue, not 
wholly a new conception, is none the less imaginative : 
a scene of night and storm, with Lucifer and the Pow- 
ers of the Air vainly assaulting the Strasburg Cross, 



and see 
" Becket " 
in index 
to this 
volunu. 



" The 
Golden 
Legetid* 
1851. 



Delightfd 
re-use of 
Gothic 
material. 



206 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 



The poet^s 
freest and 
most af- 
fluent 
work. 



baffled by the voices of the Bells, which repeat the sa- 
cred words graven on their sides. The Legend is a 
striking instance of an effort by which mediseval rituals, 
chants, and wonder-tales are boldly seized and molten 
to an alloy, whose color and tensile qualities are due to 
the solvent of the alchemist. Here and there are un- 
mistakable lustres of the poet's own vein. This would 
be recognized at sight : — 

" His gracious presence upon earth 
Was as a fire upon a hearth ; 
As pleasant songs, at morning sung, 
The words that dropped from his sweet tongue 
Strengthened our hearts." 

And this, also, is after his best fashion : — 

" I have my trials. Time has laid his hand 
Upon my heart, gently, not smiting it. 
But as a harper lays his open palm 
Upon his harp, to deaden its vibrations." 

The humor of Lucifer's soliloquies, in the Church 
and elsewhere, is characteristic of both Goethe and 
Longfellow, and therefore German with a difference. 
But all phases of our poet's verse and fancy are to be 
observed in this brilliant conglomerate. And what 
rare materials are brought together ! Here are revived 
the oft-told gest of Brother Felix, Walter the Minne- 
singer, Lucifer and the Black Paternoster, the monk- 
ish chants and anthems, the Miracle Play, the disputes 
at the School of Palermo. The richest passages are 
those contrasting the Cellar and Refectory scenes with 
the prayer-like labor of Brother Pacificus illuminating 
the Gospel in the Scriptorium above. These, with 
many beautiful counterparts, lighting page after page, 
move one to accord with those who regard "The 
Golden Legend " as a piece in which the poet's ver- 
satile genius is seen at its best. Though not the work 



FREE-HAND IDYLS. 



207 



of a natural dramatist, it is vastly superior to the pro- 
saic fabrics which are attached to it, and which fail to 
grow upon the reader in spite of this forced associa- 
tion. 

A posthumous drama, Michael A?igelo, while having 
the dignity that becomes its theme, does not change 
our view of the author's limitations. It contains ele- 
vated passages, mostly the soliloquies of the great art- 
ist, of whom in his old age it may be termed a sympa- 
thetic study, and is worth pursuing, even for something 
more than the perfect sonnet which forms the Dedica- 
tion. 

Were I to select one from the poet's long succession 
of books to fitly illustrate his traits, I might name the 
little volume of 1849, with its two divisions, " By the 
Seaside " and " By the Fireside." The Building of the 
Ship is the best example of his free-hand metrical 
style, — musical, wholesome, and suggestive of an im- 
agination that takes heat from its own action. This 
celebration of a manly and poetic form of handicraft is 
simply cast, yet full of energy and spirit. At the close, 
a sunburst of patriotism, the superb apostrophe to the 
Union, outvies that ode of Horace on which it was 
modelled. In conception and structure the poem, while 
thoroughly national, is akin to Schiller's " Lay of the 
Bell." I think that the minor lyrics in this volume, 
from " Chrysaor " to "Caspar Becerra," warrant my 
liking for it, and are peculiarly representative. The 
author long afterward supplied companion-pieces, The 
Hanging of the Crane and Keramos, to his idyl of the 
ship-yard. His reputation now made the production of 
each of these a literary event ; just as any late and 
brief work of a favorite composer sends a murmur of 
interest through the musical world. Such afterpieces 
earn for artists, in the ripeness of their fame, a more 



''Michael 
A vgclo ■,'''' 
18S2. 



A ref>re- 
scntative 
vohane : 
" T/ie 
Seaside 
and the 
Fireside,''^ 



Free-Iiand 
idyls. 



208 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 



" Tales 
of a Way- 
side Inn,'''' 
1863-1874. 



Longfel- 
low and 
Morris. 
Cp. " Vic- 
torian 
Poets " .• 
fp- 372- 
378. 



sudden reward than greater efforts which preceded 
them. All things come around at last, and often come 
too late. But Longfellow again and again received his 
crown of praise ; and this the m.ore frequently in return 
for service in which he was easily first, — the art which 
gained for an old-time minstrel a willing largess, that 
of the raconteur, the teller of bewitching tales. His 
station as a poet was not advanced by the different in- 
stalments of the Tales of a Wayside Tn7i, but it was 
much to have the delight of giving delight, as often as 
each appeared, to a host of unseen readers. And so in 
the end they formed his most extended work : a series 
of short stories, mostly gathered from older literatures, 
translated into his varying and crystalline verse, and 
linked together, like the tales of Boccaccio and Chau- 
cer, by a running commentary of the poet's own. The 
selections are good of themselves, and the conceit of 
the gathering of the poet's friends at the Sudbury 
Inn brought them near to the interest of his audi- 
ence. Nothing could be better than the prelude. A 
transfiguring portraiture from life is that of the musi- 
cian, Ole Bull. The tales here told in song for the 
first time, all of them colonial, are but four in num- 
ber, — few indeed, among so many gleaned from the 
Decameron, the Gesta Romanorum, "the chronicles of 
Charlemagne," and "the stories that recorded are by 
Pierre Alphonse." Here is the semblance of a mas- 
ter effort, but in fact a succession of minor ones; we 
perceive that no great outlay of imaginative force was 
required for this kind of work. With Longfellow's 
lyrical facility of putting a story into rippling verse, 
almost as lightly as another would tell it in prose, 
we find ourselves assured of as many poems as he 
had themes. Less subtle and refined than Morris, he 
was a better raconteur. This was due to a modern 



'DANTE'S DIVIXE COMEDY: 



2og 



and natural style, the sweet variety of his measures, 
and to his ease in dialo<^ue. He intersperses many 
reahstic passages, and by other ways avoids the mo- 
notony of the ''idle sini^er of an empty day." As for 
poetic atmosphere and all the essentials of a select 
work of beauty, the " Tales " cannot enter into com- 
parison with " The Earthly Paradise." Longfellow's 
frequent gayety and constant sense of the humani- 
ties make him a true story-teller for the multitude ; 
not, like Morris, an exquisite, dreamy singer for com- 
panions of his own guild. 

His version of The Diviiie Co?nedy is one of the 
most signal results of American labor in the depart- 



ment of translation. There was nothing in the work 
of his predecessors to prevent the task from being 
not only a matter of attraction, but a duty ; no one, 
on the score of talent or acquirements, was better 
fitted to renew an attempt which from its conditions 
never can be perfectly successful. His life-long study 
of Dante's text had brought to this natural translator 
that knowledge of it which was more than half the 
achievement. The theory of his version was the mod- 
ern one (which it helped to confirm), — that of re- 
cent and noted English translations, and of Taylor's 
" Faust," — to wit, a literal and lineal rendering. Un- 
like Taylor, Longfellow had but one measure to re- 
produce, and he discarded the rhymes altogether, while 
striving to convey the rhythm and deeper music of 
the sublime orio^inal. It was fittins^ that the neiofh- 
borhood of Cambridge, whose poets and scholars were 
for the most part sympathetic lovers of Dante, should 
furnish a new translation of the Commedia, and that 
Longfellow — less brilliant than Lowell, w^hether as a 
poet or a student, but his superior in patient industr}'- 
and evenness of taste — should be tiie one to make 
14 



TrafLsla- 

tion : 

" DatUe^s 

Divine 

Comedy ■i'^ 

1865-1S67. 



TJieory oj 
the "work. 



2IO 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, 



Competi- 
tors in the 
field. 



Merits of 
Longfel- 
low^ s ver- 
sion. 



it. We are told that his work received, from time to 
time, the criticism of a pleiad of his friends. Cer- 
tainly it was brought to birth with heralding by Nor- 
ton, — the classical translator of " Vita Nuova," — 
Howells, Greene, and others of the group. As for 
the discussions which ensued upon its merits, my im- 
pression is that points were well taken on both sides. 
Various other translations of Dante were appearing 
about this time — the six-hundredth anniversary of 
the Tuscan's birth : in Great Britain, those of Day- 
man, Ford, and Rossetti ; in America, Dr. Parsons's 
" Inferno " was before the public, — seventeen cantos 
in the rhymed pentameter quatrain, not so literal as 
Longfellow's, but the noble performance that one might 
expect from the author of the "Lines on^a Bust of 
Dante." The best of the English triad was that of 
Rossetti. It bears the stamp of a master-hand, yet 
has so many blemishes, and is here and there so awk- 
ward, as to be on the whole less satisfactory than 
Longfellow's, to which it is kindred in principle and 
method. 

The reader of Longfellow's pages is secure of a 
faithful reproduction of the original order and mean- 
ing and of Dante's manner — so far as the latter de- 
pends on linear arrangement. All these are of the 
highest value, if the vital and pervading style of the 
lofty Florentine can likewise be transferred. The 
ideal translator will reproduce all these — the sense, 
the metrical arrangement, the grandeur of tone. Un- 
til his arrival, if one of these must be sacrificed, it 
cannot be the first, and it should be, I think, the sec- 
ond rather than the third. One would prefer a prose 
rendering of the same rank with Mr. Lang's " Ho- 
mer" and " Theocritus " to a feebly correct transcrip- 
tion in English verse. Longfellow certainly aimed to 



SPIRIT OF THE TRANSLATION. 



21 I 



meet all the foregoing requirements, and in his case 
a complete failure was scarcely possible, even with 
respect to the third. But his gifts as a translator 
never were more conspicuous than when, in youth, he 
paraphrased and almost recreated so many lyrics from 
the German and other tongues. Applying a literal 
method to the Commedia, his genius is less evident 
than his talent and conscientious self-restraint. What 
he did was to translate the whole work, line for line, 
almost as literally as a class recitation, and this, bar- 
ring a few archaisms, with much simplicity and smooth- 
ness. Except in the more abstruse cantos, the ap- 
pearance of ease is so marked that one gives credit 
to the story that the poet, with his facility and mas- 
tery of the text, accomplished his task in a few years 
by writing a stated number of verses each morning, 
while waiting for his coffee to boil. If this were the 
fact, it would not do to estimate the feat by it. Where 
a man's genius lies, there he works with ease, and 
often undervalues the result; elsewhere, he "labors." 
There is nothing labored in Longfellow's translation ; | special 
the fault is of another kind : we lose, amid all its 
simplicity, the "grand manner," as Mr. Arnold would 
call it, of the divine master. A neophyte misses what 
he expected to realize of the unflinching strength and 
terror of the Inferno, the palpitating splendor of the 
Paradiso. The three divisions seem levelled, so to 
speak, to the grade of the Purgatorio, midway be- 
tween the zenith and nadir of Dante's song. This 
shortcoming is to be felt, rather than proved, and 
tells in favor of Parsons's translation, and of others 
greatly inferior to this as a w^hole. Even Gary's old- 
fashioned paraphrase, full of jNIiltonic inversions and 
epithets, and thoroughly open to Bentley's stricture 
on Pope's " Homer," has exalted passages that jus- 



character'^ 
istics and 
defects. 



212 



HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW, 



Faulty use 
of deriva- 
tives. 



tify its survival to our day. Longfellow's genuine 
scholarship led him to pursue his method, once de- 
termined on, without the slightest protrusion of skill 
and learning. Grace is added by the frequent use 
of feminine endings, — a habit natural to Longfellow, 
and increasing the likeness of his own to the original 
verse. But his rendition of many Italian words by 
English derivatives, which often have quite lost the 
etymological meaning, is an error made in the inter- 
est of extreme fidelity and really telling against it. 
A kindred one is the use of derivatives in which the 
primitive meaning is not lost, but which do not trans- 
late the text to English ears so effectively as their 
Saxon synonyms. For instance, most of the transla- 
tors — Wright, Cayley, Ford, Rossetti, etc. — have 
made havoc with the inscription over the gate of 
hell : — 

" Per me si va nella citta dolente ; 

Per me si va nell' eterno dolore ; 

Per me si va tra la perduta gente." 

Longfellow's rendering is superior to all the rest : — 

" Through me the way is to the city dolent ; 
Through me the way is to eternal dole ; 
Through me the way among the people lost." 

Yet here is a forced translation of the word " dolente " 
by a derivative which, to English readers, is not an 
equivalent. Besides, a more effective expression of 
anguish can be gained by the use of a Saxon word. 
One step further would have made Mr. Longfellow's 
rendering perfect : he might have escaped an inver- 
sion, and have matched the verbal repetition in the 
first two lines, after this wise : — 

" Through me the way is to the woful city ; 
Through me the way is to eternal woe." 



MASTERLY SONNETS. 



213 



Reading the whole work, ;iiul acccpling- the late Mr. 
Greene's opinion that the characteristics of Dante are 
Variety and Power, 1 think that the evenness of Long- 
fellow's method robs us of the former ; and as for the 
latter, it is the one thing which the lay reader of this 
translation, unrivalled as it is in many respects, does 
not adequately feel. 

The reflex influence of this effort was apparent in 
the elevated nature of his later poems. It is true 
that he occasionally used his new diction in a prosaic 
or weary manner. Of this, such a line as " The spir- 
itual v/orld preponderates," from the sonnet to Whit- 
tier, is an extreme instance. Otherwise, a firmer poetic 
quality was observable after this date. The sonnets 
which he now wrote, few as they are, entitle him to a 
place in the most select circle of modern poets. They 
rank with the best written in our century. Where, in 
fact, throughout the whole galaxy of English sonnets, 
is there a group surpassing the six which accom- 
panied the Dante volumes ? Rhythmic, perfect in 
structure, and full of beauty, they have captured the 
spirit of the Divine Song. A series wTitten in the 
poet's old age, his tributes to the memory of com- 
rades gone before, has a pathetic charm. Still later 
was composed the sonnet " Nature," which must be 
accounted one of the choicest in any language upon 
the theme to which its title is but a pass-word : — 

" As a fond mother, when the day is o'er, 

Leads by the hand her little child to bed, 

Half willing, half reluctant to be led 
And leave his broken playthings on the floor, 
Still gazing at them through the open door, 

Nor wholly reassured and comforted 

By promises of others in their stead, 
Which, though more splendid, may not please him more ; 
So Nature deals with us, and takes away 



Later 
work. 



So7inets of 

rare 

beauty. 



214 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 



" Ultima 

Thule;' 

1880. 



Longfel- 
low's 

habits and 
'ma7t7ier- 
ism. 



Formal 
imagery. 



Our playthings one by one, and by the hand 
Leads us to rest so gently, that we go 
Scarce knowing if we wish to go or stay, 
Being too full of sleep to understand 
How far the unknown transcends the what we know." 

This is, however, singularly like the translation, by 
Leigh Hunt, of Filicaja's sonnet on Providence, quoted 
by Longfellow himself in the notes to the ParadisOo 
With lessening use, the poet's touch lost little of its 
delicacy and poise. The few pieces brought together 
in Ultima Thule indicate that his ruling sense of art 
was clear as ever ; nor was it finally dulled, like Em- 
erson's bright intelligence, by a veil of darkness slowly 
drawn. He ceased from service almost without fore- 
warning, and because his work was done. 

V. 

Few poets have "been more restricted to fixed habits 
of composition. His mode was perfectly obvious and 
unchanged, save by greater refinement, during fifty 
years. Everything suggested an image, except when 
his imagery suggested the thought of which he made 
it seem a reflection. He tells us that 

" Bent like a laboring oar that toils in the surf of the ocean, 
Bent, but not broken, by age was the form of the notary public " ; 

and we feel that the image really grew out of a poet's 
conception of his personage. But again, looking upon 
" drifting currents of the river," or finding the day 
" cold and dark and dreary," or listening to the bel- 
fry-chimes, he hunts about for some emotion or phase 
of life which these things aptly illustrate. This pro- 
cess not seldom becomes a vice of style. He con- 
stantly applied his imagery in a formal way, — the very 
ut . . , ita of the Latins, the as ... so oi the eigh* 



HIS BOOKISH TENDENCY. 



215 



teenth century. But whether his metaphors came of 
themselves, or with prayer and fasting, they always 
came, and often were novel and poetic. A more try- 
ing habit was that inbred, as it seems, with the New 
England poets, most of whom have preached too much 
in verse. He tacked a didactic moral, like a corollary 
of Euclid, on many a lovely poem. No one better 
knew that " nothing is poetry which could as well 
have been expressed in prose," but the habit formed 
in youth seemed beyond his control. Still, it was 
through this habit that he became the most popular of 
University poets, and as a moralist no one could make 
commonplace more attractive. Lastly, the bookish 
flavor of his work is at once its strength and weakness : 
the former, because the very life of his genius depended 
on it ; the latter, because poetry that is over-literary 
is so much the less creative, and is otherwise open 
to the objections brought against literary art. Brown- 
ing's fondness for black-letter is redeemed by dramatic 
vigor. In reading Longfellow, we see that the world 
of books was to him the real world. From first to last, 
if he had been banished from his library, his imagina- 
tion would have been blind and deaf and silent. It 
is true that he fed upon the choicest yield of litera- 
ture ; his gathered honey was of the thyme and clover, 
not the rude buckwheat. Take, for instance, the 
" Morituri Salutamus," read before his surviving class- 
mates on the fiftieth anniversary of their graduation. 
Was there ever anything more beautiful, in view of the 
occasion ? Is not the title itself a stroke of genius .'' 
But the title also defines the method of the poem : 
there are mbre than twenty learned references in this 
piece of less than three hundred lines, including one 
entire tale from the "Gesta Romanorum." He had, 
we see, this way of working, and for once it resulted 
\n a poem that is the model of its kind. 



Moraliz- 
ing. 



Excessive 

literary 

flavor. 



" Mori- 
tiiri Salit" 
ia7n7tSf''^ 
1875- 



2l6 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 



A poet of 
*he study 
and alcove, 



As for Nature, he usually saw it as polarized by re- 
flection from the mirror Art. Whether in or out of 
his study, he had not Emerson's interpretative eye, and 
his report of landscape and the country life was less 
genuine than Lowell's or Whittier's, not to mention 
the younger poets. He rarely ventured beyond the 
simple outlook from his mansion door. The effect of 
the rain, the mist, the night-fall, upon his own spirit, 
is what he gives us, in the manner of some landscape 
of the French subjective school. A starry event, the 
occultation of Orion, at once becomes a glorious im- 
age of the triumph of Love over Force. In " Evan- 
geline " there are refined pictures of scenery that was 
familiar to him, with just as pleasing descriptions of 
that which he knew only through his books. He 
painted the landscape of half Europe in the same 
way, always a cosmopolitan, never the genius of the 
place. The flower-de-luce, with its heraldic associa- 
tions, is the emblem after which he names a volume. 
But with respect to still life and. common life, the true 
genre touch of " The Old Clock " and " The Village 
Blacksmith" grows firmer in "Miles Standish," where 
he draws so well the Plymouth interiors, the Puritan 
maiden at her wheel, the elders, and men-at-arms. 
And look ! how he describes what of all is nearest 
his heart, an olden volume : — 

" Open wide on her lap lay the well-worn psalm-book of Ains- 
worth, 

Printed in Amsterdam, the words and the music together, 

Rough-hewn, angular notes, like stones in the walls of a church- 
yard, 

Darkened and overhung by the running vine of the verses. 

Such was the book from whose pages she sang the old Puritan 
anthem." 

I more than half recant the statement that Long* 



OUR POET OF THE SEA. 



217 



fellow was not a poet of Nature, bethinking myself 
how justly others have maintained that he was by em- 
inence our poet of the Sea. He clung to the coast : 
looking inland, he cared most for the tide-meadows of 
his neighborhood ; looking oceanward, his fancy throve 
upon the omens, the mysteries, the perpetual fascina- 
tions of " sea from shore." He loved his mighty rock- 
girt bay, the lights and beacons, the mist and fog-bells, 
the sleet and surge of winter, the coastwise vessels ; 
and its memories were the drift-wood with which he 
kindled "thoughts that burned and glowed within." 
His imagination goes out to " the ocean old," the 
" gray old sea " of storms and calms ; to its winged 
frequenters, the ancient galleons, the fleets of conquest 
and embassy and traffic. The names of sunny isles 
and far-off lands were music to him. If by chance 
our fireside magician drowned his books deeper than 
did ever plummet sound, and sang from a poet's heart 
alone, it was when he returned again and again to 
capture and repeat for us the haunting " secret of the 
sea." 

Reviewing our survey of his work, I observe that 
each of his best known efforts has led to the mention 
of prose or verse by some other hand which it re- 
sembles. In view of the possible inference, we now 
may ask, Was Longfellow, then, with his great reputa- 
tion and indisputable hold upon our affections, not an 
original poet ? It must be acknowledged, at the outset, 
that few poets of his standing have profited more 
openly by examples that suited their taste and purpose. 
The evidence of this is seen not in merely three or 
four, but in a great number of his productions, — in 
his briefest lyrics, in his elaborate narrative poems. 
Like greater bards before him, he was a good borrower. 
Dependence on his equipment led to unconscious as- 



Yei otie 
■wlw 

caught the 
secret of 
tlie Sea- 



Question 
of his 
origi- 
nality. 



A persist- 
ent bor- 
rower, but 



2l8 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 



similation of its treasures. But originality is of more 
than one kind. As we say of some people that they 
have a genius for friendship, so his sympathy with the 
beautiful, wherever he found it, was unique and tan- 
tamount to a special inspiration. The proof of his 
originality, however, even where he was least inventive, 
hardly requires this paradox : it did not consist in 
word or motive, but in the distinctive tone of the 



With II 
distin :tive 
air. 



His cosjno- 

folitan- 

ism. 



And ideal 
of a na- 
tional lit- 
jyaticre. 
See pp. 5- 
so, 96, 97. 



singer, the sentiment of voice which made his per- 
formances in a sense new songs ; in an air, a suffused 
quality, which rendered every phrase unmistakable. If 
he borrowed freely, he was freely drawn upon by others 
in their turn. Scores of followers have caught a man- 
ner that shows to poor advantage when transferred ; 
but his position for years, at the head of even a senti- 
mental school, indicated that Longfellow was not with- 
out a genius of his own. 

Apart from certain exceptions already noted, his 
bent was cosmopolitan. He had the Anglo-Saxon 
longing of the pine for the palm, a love for the softer 
winds and skies, the pliant languages, of Italy and 
Spain. Besides the example of his works, we have his 
written theory of what our literature should be. His 
Mr. Churchill, in " Kavanagh," declares that in litera- 
ture " Nationality is a good thing to a certain extent, 
but universality is better. All that is best in the great 
poets of all countries is not what is national in them, 
but what is universal. Their roots are in their native 
soil 'y but their branches wave in the unpatriotic air 
that speaks the same language unto all men. ... I 
prefer what is natural. Mere nationality is often ridicu- 
lous." And again, " Our literature is not an imitation, 
but a continuation of the English." He insists upon 
originality, but " without spasms and convulsions." 
... "A national literature is not the growth of a day. 



VIEPVS ON NATIONALITY. 



219 



Centuries must contribute their dew and sunshine to 
it. . . . As for ha\'ing it so savage and wild as you 
want it, ... all literature, as well as all art, is the 
result of culture and intellectual refinement. ... As 
the blood of all nations is mingling with our own, so 
will their thoughts and feelings finally mingle in our 
literature. We shall draw from the Germans tender- 
ness, from the Spanish passion, from the French vi- 
vacity, to mingle more and more with our English 
solid sense. And this will give us universality, so 
much to be desired." With regard to all this, it may 
be said that Longfellow's service, important as it was 
in his time, is not that required of his successors. 
The greatest poets have been those who conveyed the 
spirit of their respective nationalities. That poetry 
is truest which is universal in its passion and thought, 
but national in motive and in all properties of the 
craft. The final outcome of American ideality will 
depend on conditions which our best thinkers are in- 
vestigating, and which give rise to conflicting theories. 
Herbert Spencer's recent utterance is somewhat in ac- 
cordance with Longfellow's views : " Because of its 
size, and the heterogeneity of its components, the Amer- 
ican nation will be a long time in evolving its ultimate 
form, but its ultimate form will be high." And again : 
" From biological truths it is to be inferred that the 
eventual mixture of the allied varieties of the Aryan 
race forming the population will produce a finer type 
of man than has hitherto existed." This agreeable 
prediction may seem too optimistic ; but the future 
type of poetry certainly will represent the future type 
of man. Without debating the question whether \ve 
now are forming loam for a distinct growth, or whether 
our literature is to be a '' continuation " merely, we 
may be sure that both here and in foreign lands new 



" Herbert 

Spencer on 

the A vter- 

icafts.'''' 

New 

York, 

1882. 



2 20 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 



Long/el- 
loTX) a pio- 
neer of 
taste. 



In what 
se7ise a 
' ' poet of 
the middle 
classes.'''' 



Tcjinyson. 



types of genius will appear, we know not how or why, 
and add new species to the world's flora symbolica of 
art and song. Longfellow, if not a prophet, was a 
pioneer, — by choice an apostle of the best traditional 
culture. His verse is not of a kind to make its ad- 
mirers indifferent to any other, — an effect, whether 
for good or ill, sometimes produced by Browning's, 
Emerson's, and Whitman's, — but that which, however 
elementary, promotes a taste for higher ideals. It is 
due to such as he that we have passed the age of 
nursing, and are now less satisfied with what is not 
primarily our own. That the best equipped section 
of the country should produce him was in the order 
of events : other things being equal, that region vr 
most American which has been so the longest, and 
the frontier steadily grows to resemble it. 

In England, Longfellow has been styled the poet 
of the middle classes. Those classes include, how- 
ever, the majority of intelligent readers, and Tenny- 
son had an equal share of their favor. The English 
middle classes furnish an analogue to the one great 
class of American readers, among whom our poet's 
success was so evident. This was because he used 
his culture not to veil the word, but to make it clear. 
He drew upon it for the people in a manner which 
they could relish and comprehend. Would not any 
poet whose work might lack the subtlety that com- 
mends itself to professional readers be relegated by 
University critics to the middle-class wards ? Caste 
and literary priesthood have something to do with this. 
Were it not for " Lucretius " and " In Memoriam," 
the author of " The May Queen " and " Locksley Hall " 
and " Enoch Arden " would be in the same category ; 
as it is, he scarcely escapes it in the judgment of both 
the psychologic and neo-Romantic schools. Yet the 



UNIMPASSIONED SONG. 



221 



poetry of analytics has not outlasted, in the past, that 
which came without gloss or obscurity, and whose 
melody and meaning appealed to one and all. That 
a poet's verse should require a commentary in its own 
day is not, all things considered, the best omen for 
its hold upon the future. But the point taken with 
respect to Longfellow is not unjust. So far as com- 
fort, virtue, domestic tenderness, and freedom from 
extremes of passion and incident are characteristics 
of the middle classes, he has been their minstrel. 
And it is true that a cold, or even temperate quality 
is deadening to the higher forms of art. The crea- 
tive soul abhors ennui ; it glows in dramatic self-aban- 
donment. Poets " of passion and of pain " concen- 
trate their lives in some burning; focus whose dazzlinir 
heat devours them ; they suffer, but mount on their own 
flame. Without passion and its expiations, without 
the mad waste of life, and even crime and terror, where 
are our noble tragedies, our high dramatic themes ? 
The compensation of man's anguish is that it lifts him 
beyond the ordinary. Superlative joy and woe alike 
were foreig^n to the verse of Lon2:fellow. It came nei- 
ther from the heights nor out of the depths, but along 
the even tenor of a fortunate life. I do not mean 
that he was exempt from mortal ills ; he had his dark 
experiences, but at the mature age that has learned 
"what life and death is," and of them he gave little 
sign. If sorrow and rapture are from within, rather 
than from without, it may be that our benignant poet, 
alike through circumstance and temperament, was 
spared the full extremity of discipline signified in the 
translation from Goethe : — 

" Who ne'er his bread in sorrow ate, 

Who ne'er the mournful midnight hours 
Weeping upon his bed has sate, 

He knows you not, ye Heavenly Powers." 



Poets a7ui 
their sc/io- 
liasts. 



L on f[f el- 
low's ethics 
a7id do- 
mesticity. 



Wanti7i^ 
in ecstasy 
and dra- 
matic inf 
sight. 



222 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 



Fortune^s 

favorite. 



iaetic 
voice,, -m- 
p'rtu'i ^ed 
b -J hui^-an 
f xssiof*, 
and co^^ 
f,ici. 



Not his the agony and bloody sweat. We may con- 
jecture that, aside from one or two fierce episodes, he 
was less tried in the furnace than poets are wont to 
be. From the first he had what he desired, — con- 
genial work and associations, advancement, the love 
of women and friends, appreciative criticism, the pure 
wheat and sweet waters of life in plenitude. He had 
lovely things about him, and gratified his artist na- 
ture to the full, while so many makers of the beautiful 
are condemned to Vulcan's cavern of toil and smoke. 
He had the best, as by right ; and in truth the world, 
if it but knew it, can afford to keep a poet or an artist 
in some luxury, like a flower for its perfume, a hound 
for beauty, a bird for song. If Longfellow's regard 
fell upon ugliness and misery, it certainly did not lin- 
ger there. " The cry of the human " did not haunt 
his ear. When he avails himself of a piteous situa- 
tion, he does so as tranquilly as the nuns who broi- 
der on tapestry the torments of the doomed in hell. 
He wrote few love poems, none full of longing, or 
" wild with all regret " ; but this might come from the 
absolute content of his soul, — he had gained the 
woman whom he idolized, and songs of passion are 
the cry of unfulfilled desire. His song flows on an 
equal course, from sunny fountain-head to darkling 
sea ; and even upon that sea he finds repose, for its 
billows rock to sleep, and no cradle is more peace- 
ful than the grave. Thus fair, gentle, fortunate, ~ 
could such a poet answer to the deepest needs of 
men ? Allowing for the factor of imagination, we still 
see that Longfellow shrank from efforts that would 
react too keenly upon his sensibilities. He touched 
the average heart by the sympathetic quality of a voice 
adjusted to the natural scale. People above or aparf 
from the average — sufferers, aspirants, questioners — 



A LOVABLE MAN AND ARTIST. 



223 



are irked by his acceptance of life as it is and his 
enjoyable relations to it. There is something exas- 
perating to serious minds in his placid waiver of things 
grievous or distasteful. They ask what cause he has 
advanced, how has he enlarged the province of thought, 
what confhct has he sung? Where are his rapture, 
his longing, his infinitudes ? They see his fellow-poet, 
less prosperous and accomplished, who defied obloquy, 
and rose to passion in denouncing wrong, — a man 
of peace, yet valiant as Great-Heart in behalf of free- 
dom and the rights of man. They recall another, who 
sought out the inmost laws of spiritual life. But why 
expect a poet to be other than he is .'' Recognize the 
instinct that defined his range, and value the range 
at its worth. Longfellow spoke according to his voice 
and vision. The attempt to do otherwise ends all. 
A critic must accept what is best in a poet, and thus 
become his best encourager. 

So far as good fortune may be supplemented by 
human wisdom, Longfellow was a man after the 
preacher's own heart. His was one of those happy 
natures which, as Thackeray says, are softened by 
prosperity and kindness. He was saved the torment 
that the envious feel : — 

" He did not find his sleep less sweet 
For music in some neighboring street ; 
Nor rustling hear in every breeze 
The laurels of Miltiades." 

We have seen his tact in the choice and use of 
things pertaining to his work, his carefully restrained 
decoration, his knowledge of limitations, which pre- 
vented him, except in the dramatic experiments, from 
groping for impracticable means and results. The 
forms which he introduced or revived were as suc- 
cessful as Tennyson's ; in fact, his product represents 



The poet''t 
sweet and 
wholesojfte 
disposition. 



Artistic 
tact. 



2 24 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 



Judgrnent 
stipple- 
■menting 
inspira- 
tion. 



Final 
estimate. 



H. W. L. 

died at 
Cam- 

bridge, 
Mass. , 
Mar. 24, 
1882, 



the full advance of American taste and feeling, dur- 
ing the period covered by it, though not our most sig- 
nificant thought. He was a lyrical artist, whose taste 
outranked his inspiration ; and assuredly, if he had 
been a Minister of the Fine Arts, he never would 
have abolished an ficole at the dictation of the ''im- 
pressionists," nor have adopted as a motto the phrase 
" Beware of the Beautiful." We have noted his in- 
dustry and the self-control with which he devoted his 
life to poetry alone. Yet the report of his library talk 
shows that his brain was alert upon many topics ; that 
in private, at least, he did not reserve his talents for 
his publisher, — an economy which a French critic 
declares to be " a bad sign, and the proof that one 
makes a trade of literature, and that one does not 
really have the impressions he assumes to have in his 
books." His verse is peculiarly open to the test of 
Milton's requirement, that poetry should be simple, 
sensuous, passionate. Simple, even elementary, it 
manifestly is, despite the learning which he put to 
use. It is sensuous in much that charms the ear and 
eye, and in little else ; for the extreme of sensuousness 
is deeply felt, and feeling results in passion, and pas- 
sionate the verse of Longfellow was not, nor ever 
could be. His song was a household service, the 
ritual of our feastings and mournings ; and often it 
rehearsed for us the tales of many lands, or, best of 
all, the legends of our own. I see him, a silver-haired 
minstrel, touching melodious keys, playing and sing- 
ing in the twilight, within sound of the rote of the sea. 
There he lingers late ; the curfew bell has tolled and 
the darkness closes round, till at last that tender voice 
is silent, and he softly moves unto his rest. 



CHAPTER VII. 



EDGAR ALLAN POE. 



I. 

UPON the roll of American authors a few names 
are written apart from the many. With each of 
these is associated some accident of condition, some 
memory of original or eccentric genius, through which 
it arrests attention and claims our special wonder. 
The light of none among these few has been more fer- 
vid and recurrent than that of Edgar Allan Poe. But, 
as I in turn pronounce his name, and in my turn 
would estimate the man and his writings, I am at 
once confronted by the question, Is this poet, as now 
remembered, as now portrayed to us, the real Poe 
who lived and sang and suffered, and who died but 
little more than a quarter-century ago ? 

The great heart of the world throbs warmly over 
the struggles of our kind ; the imagination of the 
world dwells upon and enlarges the glory and the 
shame of human action in the past. Year after year, 
the heart-beats are more warm, the conception grows 
more distinct with light and shade. The person that 
was is made the framework of an image to which the 
tender, the romantic, the thoughtful, the simple, and 
the wise add each his own folly or wisdom, his own 
joy and sorrow and uttermost yearning. Thus, not 
only true heroes and poets, but many who have been 
conspicuous through force of circumstances, become 



Distinc- 
tive rep-Uf 
tatiofts. 



The witch' 
ery of 
Time. 



226 



EDGAR ALLAN POE. 



A twofold 
ideal. 



Postulates. 



idealized as time goes by. The critic's first labor 
often is the task of distinguishing between men, as 
history and their works display them, and the ideals 
which one and another have conspired to urge upon 
his acceptance. 

The difficulty is increased when, as in the case of 
Poe, a twofold ideal exists, of whose opposite sides 
many that have written upon him seem to observe 
but one. In the opinion of some people, even now, 
his life was not only pitiful, but odious, and his writ- 
ings are false and insincere. They speak of his mor- 
bid genius, his unjust criticisms, his weakness and in- 
gratitude, and scarcely can endure the mention of his 
name. Others recount his history as that of a sensi- 
tive, gifted being, most sorely beset and environed, 
who was tried beyond his strength and prematurely 
yielded, but still uttered not a few undying strains. 
As a new generation has arisen, and those of his own 
who knew him are passing away, the latter class of 
his reviewers seems to outnumber the former. A cho- 
rus of indiscriminate praise has grown so loud as 
really to be an ill omen for his fame ; yet, on the 
whole, the wisest modern estimate of his character and 
writings has not lessened the interest long ago felt 
in them at home and abroad. 

It seems to me that two things at least are certain. 
First, and J although his life has been the subject of 
the research which is awarded only to strange and 
suggestive careers, he was, after all, a man of like 
passions with ourselves, — one who, if weaker in his 
weaknesses than many, and stronger in his strength, 
may not have been so bad, nor yet so good, as one 
and another have painted him. Thousands have gone 
as far toward both extremes, and the world never has 
heard of them. Only the gift of genius has made the 



HIS GENIUS AND BEARING. 



227 



Uniqiie 



temperament of Poe a common theme. And thus, I 
also think, we are sure, in once more calling up his 
shade, that we invoke the manes of a poet. Of his 
riirht to this much-abused title there can be little dis- 
pute, nor of the claim that, whatever he lacked in 
compass, he was unique among his fellows, — so dif- 
ferent from any other writer that America has pro- !7f^('<>'^'^ 

■' ^ Foe s zcn- 

ducccl as really to stand alone. He must have had 
genius to furnish even the basis for an ideal which 
excites this persistent interest. Yes, we are on firm 
ground with relation to his genuineness as a poet. 
But his narrowness of range, and the slender body 
of his poetic remains, of themselves should make 
writers hesitate to pronounce him our greatest one. 
His verse is as conspicuous for what it shows he 
could not do as for that which he did. He is another 
of those poets, outside the New England school, of 
whom each has made his mark in a separate way, — 
among them all, none more decisively than Poe. So 
far as the judgment of a few rare spirits in foreign 
lands may be counted the verdict of " posterity," an 
estimate of him is not to be lightly and flippantly 
made. Nor is it long since a group of his contem- 
poraries and successors, in his own country, spoke of 
him as a poet whose works are a lasting monument, 
and of his " imperishable " fame. 

After every allowance, it seems difficult ."or one not 
utterly jaded to read his poetry and tales without 
yielding to their original and haunting spell. Even 
as we drive out of mind the popular conceptions of 
his nature, and look only at the portraits of him in 
the flesh, we needs must pause and contemplate, 
thoughtfully and with renewed feeling, one of the 
marked ideal faces that seem — like those of Byron, 
Pe Musset, Heine — to fulfil all the traditions of 



Personal 
aspect. 



228 



EDGAR ALLAN POE. 



Halpin's 
likeness of 
Poe^ /« the 
complete 
A titer ican 
editio7i. 



Later 
portraits. 



genius, of picturesqueness, of literary and romantic 
effect. 

Halpin's engraving of Poe, in which the draughts- 
man was no servile copyist, but strove to express the 
sitter at his best, makes it possible to recall the poet 
delineated by those who knew and admired him in 
his nobler seasons. We see one they describe as 
slight but erect of figure, athletic and well moulded, 
of middle height, but so proportioned as to seem 
every inch a man ; his head finely modelled, with a 
forehead and temples large and not unlike those of 
Bonaparte ; his hands fair as a woman's, — in all, a 
graceful, well-dressed gentleman, — one, even in the 
garb of poverty, " with gentleman written all over 
him." We see the handsome, intellectual face, the 
dark and clustering hair, the clear and sad gray-violet 
eyes, - — large, lustrous, glowing with expression, — the 
mouth, whose smile at least was sweet and winning. 
We imagine the soft, musical voice (a delicate thing 
in man or woman), the easy, quiet movement, the 
bearing that no failure could humble. And this man 
had not only the gift of beauty, but the passionate 
love of beauty, — either of which may be as great a 
blessing or peril as can befall a human being stretched 
upon the rack of this tough world. 

But look at some daguerreotype taken shortly be- 
fore his death, and it is like an inauspicious mirror, 
that shows all too clearly the ravage made by a vexed 
spirit within, and loses the qualities which only a liv- 
ing artist could feel and capture. Here is the dra- 
matic, defiant bearing, but with it the bitterness of 
scorn. The disdain of an habitual sneer has found 
an abode on the mouth, yet scarcely can hide the 
tremor of irresolution. In Bendann's likeness, indu- 
bitably faithful, we find those hardened lines of the 



Repro- 
duced 
in the 



A TWOFOLD NATURE. 



229 



chin and neck I'nat are often \isil)le in men who have 
gambled heavil)-, which Poe chd nol in his mature 
years, or who ha\-e h\ed kjosely and slept ill. The 
face tells of battling, of conquering external enemies, 
of many a defeat when the man was at war with his 
meaner self. 

Among the pen-portraits of Poe, at his best and 
his worst, none seem more striking in their juxtaposi- 
tion, none less affected by friendship or hatred, than 
those left to us by C F. Briggs, the poet's early asso- 
ciate. These were made but a short time before the 
writer's death, — after the lapse of years had softened 
the prejudices of a man prejudiced indeed, yet of a 
kindly heart, and had rendered the critical habit of 
the journalist almost a rule of action. 

If these external aspects were the signs of charac- 
ter within, w^e can understand why those who saw 
them should have believed of Poe — and in a differ- 
ent sense than of Hawthorne — that 

" Two natures in him strove 
Like day with night, his sunshine and his gloom." 

The recorded facts of his life serve to enhance this 
feeling. My object here is not biography, yet let us 
note the brief annals of a wayward, time-tossed critic, 
romancer, poet. Their purport and outline, seen 
through a cloud of obscurities, and the veil thrown 
over them by his own love of mystery and retreat, — 
made out from the various narratives of those who 
have contended in zeal to discover the minute affairs 
of this uncommon man, — the substance of them all, 
I say, may readily enough be told. 



" Aft- mo- 
rial I'ol- 
ia)u\'"' 
Bait., 1S77. 



Reprinted 
iti tlic New 
York''- 1 71- 
dcpen- 
dcjit;'' 
June 24, 
iSSo. 






230 



EDGAR ALLAN POE. 



Edgar A l- 
lan Poe : 
born in 
Boston., 
January 
19, 1809. 



His child- 
hood. 



II. 

The law of chance, that has so much to do with 
the composition of a man, that makes no two alike, 
yet adjusts the most of us to a common average, 
brings about exceptional unions like the one from 
which the poet sprang. A well-born, dissolute Mary- 
land boy, with a passion for the stage, marries an 
actress and adopts her profession, — taking up a life 
that was strolling, precarious, half - despised in the 
pioneer times. Three children were the fruit of this 
love-match. The second, Edgar, was born in Boston, 
January 19, 1809. From his father he inherited Ital- 
ian, French, and Irish blood ; the Celtic pride of dis- 
position and certain weaknesses that were his bane. 
His mother, Elizabeth Arnold, an actress of some tal- 
ent, was as purely English as her name. Two years 
after his birth, the hapless parents, wearied and des- 
titute, died at Richmond, both in the same week. 
The orphans "found kind friends," and were adopted 
— the oldest, William, by his grandfather Poe, of Bal- 
timore ; Edgar and Rosalie by citizens of Richmond. 
Edgar gained a protector in Mr. Allan, an English- 
born and wealthy merchant, who was married, but 
without a child. The boy's beauty and precocity won 
the heart of this gentleman, who gave him his name, 
and lavished upon him, in true Southern style, all 
that perilous endearment which befits the son and 
heir of a generous house. Servants, horses, dogs, the 
finest clothes, a purse well filled, all these were at his 
disposal from the outset. Great pains were taken 
with his education, the one element of moral disci- 
pline seemingly excepted. When eight years old he 
went with Mr. Allan to England, and was at the 
school in Stoke-Newington, to which it is thought his 



FIRST BOOK OF POEMS. 



231 



memory went back in after years, when he wrote the 
tale of "WilHani Wilson." At ten we fitul him at 
school in Richmond, proficient in classical studies 
but shirking his mathematics, already writing verse, — 
instinctively 

" Seeking witli hand and heart 
The teacher whom he learned to love 

Before he knew 't was Art." 

His grace and strength, his free, romantic, and ardent 
bearing, made him friends among old and young, and 
at this time he certainly was capable of the most 
passionate loyalty to those he loved. Traditions of 
all this — of his dreamy, fitful temperament, of his 
early sorrows and his midnight mournings over the 
grave of an affectionate woman who had been his 
paragon — are carefully preserved. He was a school- 
boy, here and there, until 1826, when he passed a 
winter at the University of Virginia. He ended his 
brief course in the school of ancient and modern lan- 
guages with a successful examination, but after much 
dissipation and gambling which deeply involved him 
in debt. His thoughtlessness and practical ingrati- 
tude justly incensed an unwise but hitherto devoted 
guardian. A rupture followed between the two, Mr. 
Allan finally refusing to countenance Edgar's extrav- 
agances ; and the young man betook himself to Bos- 
ton, where, after a few months, he succeeded in find- 
ing a printer for his first little book, a revised collec- 
tion of juvenile poems. But he was soon reduced to 
straits, and driven to enlistment, under a partly ficti- 
tious name, as a soldier ; in which capacity, first a 
private and then by promotion a sergeant-major, he 
served his country for almost two years. In 1829 he 
was touched by news of the death of Mrs. Allan, 
who had always given him a sympathetic mother's 



Traini}t^. 



College 
life. 



" Tamer- 
liDie atid 
Other 
Poems,'''' 
Boston, 
1827. Re- 
printed, 
•with 
changes 
and anis- 
sious, 

Baltiviore, 
1S29. 

Enlistjnent 
in t/ie 
army> 



IfiJ 



232 



EDGAR ALLAN POE. 



" Edgar 
A llatt 
Poey 
G. E. 

U'ood- 
herry : 
Bostofi^ 
1885. 



By 



West 
Point. 



Subscrip- 
tion edition 
of his 
foems : 
New 
York, 
1831. 



love. He obtained a furlough, and effected a recon- 
ciliation with the widower in his hour of loneliness 
and sorrow. Poe's later and trustworthy biographer 
has spared no pains to give the true details of the 
youth's enlistment, service, and final discharge through 
the influence of his early protector. 

About this time he visited his aunt, Mrs. Maria 
Clemm, of Baltimore. Her daughter Virginia was 
then six years old, and Poe interested himself in the 
sweet and gentle child, who loved him from the first, 
and made his will her law through girlhood and their 
subsequent wedded life. 

Poe now was asked to choose a profession ; he 
selected that of arms, and his benefactor secured his 
admission to West Point. Here we find him in 1830, 
and find little good of him. Though now a man 
grown, he was unable to endure discipline. After a 
first success, he tired of the place and brought about 
his own expulsion and disgrace, to his patron's deep, 
and this time lasting, resentment. But here he also 
arranged for the issue, by subscription, of another 
edition of his poems, which was delivered to his class- 
mates after his departure from the academy. 

A new personage now comes upon the scene. Mr. 
Allan, naturally desiring affection from some quarter, 
married again, and after a time heirs were born to the 
estate which Poe, had he been less reckless, might 
have inherited. The poet, returning in disgrace to 
Richmond, found no intercessor in the home of his 
youth. This change, and his manner of life thus far, 
render it needless to look for other causes of the 
final rupture between himself and his guardian. It 
was the just avenge of fate for his persistent folly, and 
a defeat was inevitable in his contest (if there was a 
contest) with a lady who, by every law of right, was 



LIFE AND LITERARY CAREER. 



233 



stronfrer lIkui he. Toe went out into the world with 
full permission to have the one treasure he had 
seemed to \alue — his own way. Like a multitude of 
American youths, often the sons or grandsons of suc- 
cessful men, he found himself of age, without the 
means proportionate to the education, habits, and 
needs of a gentleman, and literally, in the place of an 
unfailing income, without a cent. Better off than 
many who have erred less, he had one strong ally — 
his pen. With this he was henceforth to earn his 
own bed and board, and lead the arduous life of a 
working man of letters. 

For the struggle now begun his resources of tact, 
good sense, self-poise, were as deficient as his intel- 
lectual equipment was great. Soon after the loss of a 
home-right, which he forfeited more recklessly than 
Esau, his professional career may be said to have be- 
gun. It extended, with brief but frequent intermis- 
sions, from 1832 to 1849, the year of his untimely 
death. Its first noteworthy event was the celebrated 
introduction to Kennedy, Latrobe, and Miller, through 
his success in winning a literary prize with " A MS. 
Found in a Bottle." This brought him friends, work, 
and local reputation, — in all, a fair and well-earned 
start. 

Seventeen years, thenceforward, of working life, in 
which no other American WTiter w^as more active and 
prominent. I have considered elsew^here the influence 
of journalism upon authorship. It enabled Poe to 
live. On the other hand, while he rarely made his 
lighter work commonplace, it limited the importance 
of his highest efforts, gave a paragraphic air to his 
criticisms, and left some of his most suggestive wTit- 
ings mere fragments of what they should be. He 
discovered the pretentious mediocrity of a host of 



Adrift. 



His one 

ally. 



A good 
start. 



Siim-marj 

0/ his 
career. 



See Chap. 
XI., and 
cp. " Vic- 
torian 
Poets"' : 
pp. 81, 82. 



234 



EDGAR ALLAN POE. 



Head and 
heart. 



" The Imp 
of the Per- 



Precari- 
ous life of 
A merican 
atdhors at 
that time. 



scribblers, and when unbiased by personal feeling, 
and especially when doing imaginative work, was one 
of the few clear-headed writers of his day. He knew 
what he desired to produce, and how to produce it. 
We say of a man that his head may be wrong, but his 
heart is all right. There were times enough when the 
reverse of this was true of Poe. I do not say there 
were not other times when his heart was as sound as 
his perceptions. What, after all, is the record of his 
years of work, and what is the significance of that 
record t We must consider the man in his environ- 
ment, and the transient, uncertain character of the 
markets to which he brought his wares. His labors, 
then, were continually impeded, broken, changed ; first, 
by the most trying and uncontrollable nature that ever 
poet possessed, that ever possessed a poet ; by an 
unquiet, capricious temper, a childish enslavement to 
his own " Imp of the Perverse," a scornful pettiness 
that made him "hard to help," that drove him to 
quarrel with his patient, generous friends, and to wage 
ignoble conflict with enemies of his own making ; by 
physical and moral lapses, partly the result of inher- 
ited taint, in which he resorted, more or less fre- 
quently, and usually at critical moments, — seasons 
when he needed all his resources, all his courage and 
manhood, — to stimulants which he knew would mad- 
den and besot him more than other men. None the 
less his genius was apparent, his power felt, his labor 
in demand wherever the means existed to pay for it. 



But here, again, his life was made precarious and 
shifting by the speculative, ill-requited nature of lit- 
erary enterprises at that time. From various causes, 
therefore, his record — no matter how it is attacked 
or defended — is one of irregularity, of broken and 
renewed engagements. From 1832 to 1835 Poe had 



' THIS WORKING-DA Y WORLD? 



235 



but himself to support, and a careless young fellow 
always gets on so long as he is young, with one suc- 
cess and the chance of a future. The next year his 
private marriage to his sweet cousin Virginia, still 
almost a child, W'as reafifirmed in public, and the two 
set up their home together. The time had come when 
Poe, with his sense of the fitness of things, could see 
that Bohemianism, the charm of youth, is a frame 
that poorly suits the portrait of a mature and able- 
handed man. So we are not surprised to find him 
engaged, for honest w^ages, upon " The Southern Liter- 
ary Messenger." That his skilful touch and fantastic 
genius, whether devoted to realistic or psychological 
invention, were now at full command, is shown by his 
" Hans Pfaall," and by his first striking contribution 
to the " Messenger," the spectral and characteristic 
tale of " Berenice." In short, he did uncommon \vork, 
for that time, upon the famous Southern magazine, 
both as tale-writer and as critic, and increased its 
reputation and income. Yet he felt, with all the mor- 
bid sensitiveness of one spoilt by luxury and arro- 
gance in youth, the difference between his present 
work -a- day life and the independence, the social 
standing, which if again at his command would ena- 
ble him to indulge his finer tastes and finish at ease 
the work best suited to his powers. From this time 
he was subject to moods of brooding and despair, of 
crying out upon fate, that were his pest and his ulti- 
mate destruction. And so \ve again are not surprised 
to find this good beginning no true omen of the fif- 
teen years to come ; and that these years are counted 
by fiittings here and there between points that offered 
employment; by new engagements taken up before 
he was off \vith the old ; by legends of his bearing 
and entanglements in the social w^orld he entered ; by 



Marriage 
iviih Vir- 
ginia 
Clevim, 
1835- 



Journal- 
ism. 



Mental 
sjcff'eritif. 



X 



Wafider* 
ings. 



236 



EDGAR ALLAN POE. 



Work. 



Mis/or 
tunes. 



-f 



Death, in 
Baltimore.^ 
October 7, 
1849. 



alternate successes and disgraces, in Richmond, Phil- 
adelphia, Boston, New York ; by friendships and fall- 
ings out with many of the editors who employed him, 
— the product, after all, with which we are chiefly 
concerned being his always distinctive writings for the 
"Quarterly," "The Gentleman's Magazine," "Gra- 
ham's," "Godey's," "The Mirror," "The American 
Review," and various other fosterers and distributers 
of such literature as the current taste might demand. 
We begin to understand his spasmodic, versatile indus- 
try, his balks and breaks, his frequent poverty, de- 
spondency, self-abandonment, and almost to wonder 
that the sensitive feminine spirit — worshipping beauty 
and abhorrent of ugliness and pain, combating with 
pride, with inherited disease of appetite — did not 
sooner yield, was not utterly overcome almost at the 
outset of these experiences. So have I wondered at 
seeing a delicate forest-bird, leagues from the shore, 
keep itself on the wing above relentless waters into 
which it was sure to fall at last.-^ Poe had his ^ood 
genius and his bad. Near the close of the struggle 
he made a brave effort, and never was so earnest and 
resolved, so much his own master, as just before the 
end. But a man is no stronger than his weakest part, 
and with the snapping of that his chance is over. At 
the moment when the poet, rallying from the desola- 
tion caused by the loss of his wife, found new hope 



1 Finely paraphrased, since the original appearance of this 
chapter, by my friend, Mr. Winter : — 

" Far from the blooming field and fragrant wood 
The shining songster of the summer sky, 
O'er ocean's black and frightful solitude, 

Driven on broken wing, must sink and die"; 

Poem read at the Dedication of the A dors' MonwneiA 
to Poe, May 4, 1885, 



FOLLOWING THE MARKET. 



237 



anfl purpose, and was on his way to marry a w'oman 
who possibly might have saved iiim, the tragedy of 
his hie began again. Its final scene was as swift, 
irreparable, black with terror, as that of any drama 
ever written. His death was gloom. Men saw him 
no more ; but the shadow of a veiled old woman, 
mourning for him, hovered here and there. After 
many years a laurelled tomb was placed above his 
ashes, and there remain to American literature the 
relics, so unequal in value, of the most isolated and 
exceptional of all its poets and pioneers. 

Poe's misfortunes were less than those of some who 
have conquered misfortune. Others have been cast- 
aways in infancy and friendless in manhood, and have 
found no protectors such as came at his need. Still 
others have struggled and suffered, and have declined 
to wear their hearts upon their sleeves. They have 
sought consolation in their work, and from their bit- 
ter experiences have gathered strength and glory. 
The essential part of an artist's life is that of his in- 
spired moments. There were occasions when Poe was 
the master, when his criticism was true, when he com- 
posed such tales as " Ligeia," " The Fall of the House 
of Usher," poems like "The Raven," "The Bells," 
" The City in the Sea." It must be acknowledged, 
moreover — and professional writers know what this 
implies — that Poe, in his wanderings, after all, fol- 
• lowed his market. It gradually drifted to the North, 
until New York afforded the surest recompense to 
authors not snugly housed in the leafy coverts of New 
England. Nor did he ever resort to any mercantile 
employment for a livelihood. As we look around and 
see how authors accept this or that method of support, 
there seems to be something chivalrous in the attitude 
of one who never earned a dollar except by his pen. 



Mrs. 

Maria 

Cletnm. 



The liter- 
ary mar- 
ket. 

See pp. 22- 
25, 38. 



238 



EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 



A genuine 
man of 
letters. 



Interest 

excited by 
Poe^s life 
andworks. 



" Tales of 
the Gro- 
tesque and 
Ara- 
besque,^'' 
1840. 



From first to last he was simply a poet and man of 
letters, who rightly might claim to be judged by the 
literary product of his life. The life itself differed 
from that of any modern poet of equal genius, and 
partly because none other has found himself, in a new 
country, among such elements. Too much has been 
written about the man, too little of his times. 

His story has had a fascination for those who con-= 
sider the infirmity of genius its natural outward sign. 
The peculiarity of his actions was their leaning toward 
what is called the melodramatic j of his work, that it 
aimed above the level of its time. What has been 
written of the former — of little value as compared 
with the analysis derivable from his literary remains — 
was for a long time the output of those who, if unable 
to produce a stanza which he would have acknowl- 
edged, at least felt within themselves the possibilities 
of his errant career. Yet, as I observe the marvels of 
his handicraft, I seem unjust to these enthusiasts. It 
was the kind which most impresses the imagination of 
youth, and youth is a period at which the critical de- 
velopment of many biographers seems to be arrested. 
And who would not recall the zest with which he read, 
in school-boy days, and by the stolen candle, a legend 
so fearful in its beauty and so beautiful in its fear as 
" The Masque of the Red Death," for example, found 
in some stray number of a magazine, and making the 
printed trash that convoyed it seem so vapid and 
drear } Not long after, we had the collected series, 
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. With what ea- 
gerness we caught them from hand to hand until many 
of us knew them almost by heart. In the East, at that 
time, Hawthorne was shyly putting out his " Mosses " 
and " Twice Told Tales," and it was not an unfruitful 
period that fostered, among its brood of chattering and 



HIS LYRICAL REMALXS. 



239 



aimless sentimentalists, two such spirits at once, each 
original in his kind. To-day we have a more con- 
summate, realistic art. But where, now, the creative 
ardor, the power to touch the stops, if need be, of 
tragedy and superstition and remorse ! Our taste is 
more refined, our faculties are under control ; to pro- 
duce the greatest art they must, at times, compel the 
artist. " Poetr}'," said Poe, "' has been with me a 
passion, not a purpose," — a remarkable sentence to 
be found in a boyish preface, and I believe that he 
wrote the truth. But here, again, he displays an op- 
posite failing. If poetry had been with him no less a 
passion, and equally a purpose, we now should have 
had something more to represent his rhythmical genius 
than the few brief, occasional lyrics which are all that 
his thirty years of life as a poet — the life of his early 
choice — have left to us. 



III. 

In estimating him as a poet, the dates of these lyrics 
are of minor consequence. They make but a thin 
volume, smaller than one which might hold the verse 
of Collins or Gray. Their range is narrower still. It 
is a curious fact that Poe struck, in youth, the key- 
notes of a few themes, and that some of his best pieces, 
as we now have them, are but variations upon their 
earlier treatment. 

His first collection was made in his eighteenth year, 
revised in his twentieth, and again reprinted, with 
changes and omissions, just after he left West Point. 
The form of the longer poems is copied from Byron j 
and Moore, while the spirit of the whole series vaguely 
reminds us of Shelley in his obscurer lyrical mood. 
Poe's originality can be found in them, but they would 



Poetry a 
passion 
Tjith hhn. 



Lyricetl 
rcuiaitts. 



Early 
books of 
verse '■ 
printed^ 
respective- 
ly, VI 1S27, 
1829, afid 
1831. 



240 



EDGAR ALLAN POE. 



Gernts of 
his later 
^oems. 



His use of 
foesy. 



Precocity. 



be valueless except for his after career. They have 
unusual significance as the shapeless germs of much 
that was to grow into form and beauty. Crude and 
wandering pieces, entitled " Fairy Land " and " Irene," 

" To ," " A Paean," etc., were the originals of 

" The Sleeper," " A Dream within a Dream," and 
" Lenore " ; while " The Doomed City " and '' The 
Valley Nis " reappear as " The City in the Sea " 
and " The Valley of Unrest." Others were less thor- 
oughly rewritten. Possibly he thus remodelled his 
juvenile verse to show that, however inchoate, it 
contained something worth a master's handling. Mr. 
Stoddard thinks, and not without reason, that he found 
it an easy way of making salable " copy." The poet 
himself intimates that circumstances beyond his con- 
trol restricted his lyrical product. I scarcely remember 
another instance where a writer has so hoarded his 
early songs, and am in doubt whether to commend or 
deprecate their reproduction. It does not betoken 
affluence, but it was honest in Poe that he would not 
write in cold blood for the mere sake of composing. 
This he undoubtedly had the skill to do, and would 
have done, if his sole object had been creation of the 
beautiful, or art for art's sake. He used his lyrical gift 
mostly to express veritable feelings and moods — I 
might almost say a single feeling or mood — to which 
he could not otherwise give utterance, resorting to mel- 
ody when prose was insufficient. Herein he was true 
to the cardinal, antique conception of poesy, and in 
keeping it distinct from his main literary work he con- 
firmed his own avowal that it was to him a passion, 
and neither a purpose nor a pursuit. 

A few poems, just as they stood in his early vol- 
umes, are admirable in thought or finish. One is the 
sonnet, " To Science," which is striking, not as a son- 



'THE RAVEN AND OTHER POEMS? 



241 



net, but for its premonition of attitudes which poetry 
and science have now more clearly assumed. Another 
is the exquisite lyric, " To Helen," which every critic 
lono-s to cite. Its confusion of imagery is wholly for- 
gotten in the delight afforded by melody, lyrical per- 
fection, sweet and classic grace. I do not understand 
why he omitted this charming trifle from the juvenile 
poems which he added to the collection of 1845. Al- 
though it first appeared in his edition of 183 1, he 
claimed to have written it when fourteen, and nothing 
more fresh and delicate came from his pen in maturer 
years. 

The instant success of " The Raven " — and this 
was within a few years of his death — first made him 
popular as a poet, and resulted in a new collection of 
his verses. The lyrics which it contained, and a few 
written afterward, — " Ulalume," "The Bells," "For 
Annie," etc., — now comprise the whole of his poetry 
as retained in the standard editions. The most glaring 
faults of "AlAaraaf" and "Tamerlane" have been 
selected by eulogists for special praise. Turning from 
this practice-work to the poems which made his rep- 
utation, we come at once to the most widely known 
of all. 

Poe could not have written " The Raven " in youth. 
It exhibits a method so positive as almost to compel us 
to accept, against the denial of his associates, his own 
account of its building. The maker does keep a firm 
hand on it throughout, and for once seems to set 
his purpose above his passion. This appears in the 
gravely quaint diction, and in the contrast between 
the reality of every-day manners and the profounder 
reality of a spiritual shadow upon the human heart. 
The grimness of fate is suggested by phrases which it 
requires a masterly hand to subdue to the meaning of 

16 



" TJie 
Raven and 
Other 
Poems.?'* 
1845- 



" TJit 
Raven? 



7^ 



242 



EDGAR ALLAN POE. 



f7ot his 

%7ibtlest 
^oetn. 



K The City 
in the 
Sea." 



the poem. "'Sir,' said I, ' or madam,' " "this un- 
gainly fowl," and the like, sustain the air of grotesque- 
ness, and become a foil to the pathos, an approach 
to the tragical climax, of this unique production. Only 
genius can deal so closely with the grotesque, i and 
make it add to the solemn beauty of structure an effect 
like that of the gargoyles seen by moonlight on the 
fa9ade of Notre Dame. 

In no other lyric is Poe so self-possessed. No other 
is so determinate in its. repetends and alliterations. 
Hence I am far from deeming it his most poetical poem. 
Its artificial qualities are those which catch the fancy 
of the general reader ; and it is of all his ballads, if not 
the most imaginative, ^he most peculiar. His more 
ethereal productions seem to me those in which there 
is the appearance, at least, of spontaneity, — in which 
he yields to his feelings, while dying falls and cadences 
most musical, most melancholy, come from him una- 
wares. Literal criticisms of " The Raven " are of small 
account. If the shadow of the bird could not fall upon 
the mourner, the shadows of its evil presence could 
brood upon his soul ; the seraphim whose footfalls 
tinkle upon the tufted floor may be regarded as sera- 
phim of the Orient, their anklets hung with celestial 
bells. At all events, Poe's raven is the very genius of 
the Night's Plutonian shore, different from other ra- 
vens, entirely his own, and none other can take its 
place. It is an emblem of the Irreparable, the guar- 
dian of pitiless memories, whose burden ever recalls to 
us the days that are no more. 

As a new creation, then, " The Raven " is entitled 
to a place in literature, and keeps it. But how much 
more imaginative is such a poem as " The City in tlie 
Sea"! As a picture, this reminds us of Turner, and, 
again, of that sublime madman, John Martin. Here 



MYSTIC MELODY. 



243 



is a strange city where Death has raised a throne. 

Its 

" shrines and palaces and towers 
(Timc-caten towers that tremble not !) 
Resemble nothing that is ours. 
Around, by lifting winds forgot, 
Resignedly beneath the sky 
The melancholy waters lie." 

This mystical town is aglow with light, not from 
heaven, but from out the lurid sea, — light w^hich 
streams up the turrets and pinnacles and domes, — 

"Up many and many a marvellous shrine, 
Whose wreathed friezes intertwine 
The viol, the violet, and the vine. 

While, from a proud tower in the town, 
Death looks gigantically down." 

The sea about is hideously serene, but at last there 
is a movement ; the tow^ers seem slightly to sink ; the 
dull tide has a redder glow^, — 

" And when, amid no earthly moans, 

Down, down that town shall settle hence. 
Hell, rising from a thousand thrones, 
Shall do it reverence." 

This poem, notwithstanding its sombreness and ter- 
ror, depends upon effects which made Poe the fore- 
runner of our chief experts in form and sound, and 
both the language and the conception are suggestive 
in a high degree. 

" The Sleeper " is even more poetic. It distills, 
like drops from the opiate vapor of the swooning 
moonlit night, all the melody, the fantasy, the exalta- 
tion, that befit the vision of a beautiful woman lying 
in her shroud, silent in her length of tress, waiting 
to exchange her death chamber 



Sleeker J' 



244 



EDGAR ALLAN POE, 



" The 



"for one more holy, 
This bed, for one more melancholy." 

Poe's ideality cannot be gainsaid, but it aided him 
with few, very few, images, and those seemed to 
haunt his brain perpetually. Such an image is that 
of the beings who lend their menace to the tone of 
the funeral bells : — 

" And the people, — ah, the people, ■ — 
They that dwell up in the steeple 

All alone. 
And who, tolling, tolling, tolling. 

In that muffled monotone, 
Feel a glory in so rolling 

On the human heart a stone, — 
They are neither man nor woman. 
They are neither brute nor human, 
They are Ghouls." 

In the same remarkable fantasia the bells themselves 
become human, and it is a master-s'troke that makes 
us hear them shriek out of tune, 

" In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire," 

and forces us to the very madness with which they 
are 

"Leaping higher, higher, higher, 
With a desperate desire, 
And a resolute endeavor 
Now — now to sit, or never, 
By the side of the pale-faced moon." 

Clearly this extravagance was suggested by the pic- 
ture and the rhyme. But it so carries us with it 
that we think not of its meaning ; we share in the 
delirium of the bells, and nothing can be too ex- 
treme for the abandon to which we yield ourselves, 
led by the faith and frenzy of the poet. 

The hinting, intermittent qualities of a few lyrics 



THE REFRAIX AXD REPETEND. 



245 



remind us of Shelley and Coleridge, with whom Poe 
always was in sympathy. The conception of " The 
Raven " was new, but in method it bears a likeness 
to "Lady Geraldine's Courtship," so closely, in fact, 
that the rhythm of the one probably was suggested 
by that of the other. In motive they are so different 
that neither Poe nor Mrs. Browning could feel ag- 
grieved. After an examination of dates, and of other 
matters relating to the genesis of each poem, I have 
satisfied myself, against much reasoning to the con- 
trary, that, Poe derived his use of the refrain and 
repetend, here and elsewhere, from the English sibyl, 
by whom they were employed to the verge of man- 
nerism in her earliest lyrics. 

"The Conqueror Worm" expresses in a single 
moan the hopelessness of the poet's vigils among the 
tombs, where he demanded of silence and the night 
some tidings of the dead. All he knew was that 

" No voice from that sublimer world hath ever 
To sage or poet these responses given." 

The most he dared to ask for " The Sleeper " was 
oblivion ; that her sleep might be as deep as it was 
lasting. We lay the dead " in the cold ground " or in 
the warm, flower-springing bosom of dear Earth, as 
best may fit the hearts of those who mourn them. 
But the tomb, the end of mortality, is voiceless still. 
If you w^ould find the beginning of immortality, seek 
some other oracle. " The Conqueror Worm " is the 
most despairing of lyrics, yet quite essential to the 
mystical purpose of the tale " Ligeia." But to brood 
upon men as mimes, ironically cast " in the form of 
God on high," — mere puppets, where 

" the play is the tragedy, * Man,' 
And its hero the Conqueror Worm," 



Use 0/ the 
refrain 
atui repe- 
tend^ by 
Mrs. 

Browning 
and by 
Poe. Cp. 
"• Victori- 
an Poets''^: 
p. 145. 



" The Con- 

queror 

^orm." 



245 



EDGAR ALLAN POE. 



Requiems. 



Art's 
strong- 
C07npul- 
sion. 



" Ula- 



— that way madness lies, indeed./ In the lyric, "For 
Annie," death is a trance ; the soul lingers, calm and 
at rest, for the fever, called living, is conquered. 
Human love remains, and its last kiss is still a balm. 
Something may be hereafter, — but what, who knows ? 
For repose, and for delicate and unstudied melody, it 
is one of Poe's truest poems, and his tenderest. Dur- 
ing the brief period in which he survived his wife, he 
seemed to have a vision of rest in death, and not of 
horror. Two lyrics, widely different, and one of them 
of a most singular nature, are thought to be requiems 
for his lost companion. It is from no baseness, but 
from a divine instinct, that genuine artists are com- 
pelled to go on with their work and to make their 
own misery, no less than their joy, promote its uses. 
Their most sacred experiences become, not of their 
volition, its themes and illustrations. Every man as 
an individual is secondary to what he is as a worker 
for the progress of his kind and the glory of the gift 
allotted to him. 

Therefore, whether Poe adored his wife or not, her 
image became the ideal of these poems. I shall add 
little here to all that has been written of " Ulalume. ' 
It is so strange, so unlike anything that preceded it, 
so vague and yet so full of meaning, that of itself it 
might establish a new method. To me it seems an 
improvisation, such as a violinist might play upon the 
instrument which had become his one thing of worth 
after the death of a companion had left him alone 
with his own soul. Poe remodelled and made the 
most of his first broken draft, and had the grace not 
to analyze the process. I have accepted his analysis 
of •■' The Raven " as more than half true. Poets know 
that an entire poem often is suggested by one of its 
lines, even by a refrain or a bit of rhythm. From this 



HIS HIGHER POETIC RANGE. 



247 



it builds itself. The last or any other stanza may be 
written first ; and wliat at first is without form is not 
void, — for ultimately it will be perfected into shape 
and meaning. If " Ulalume " may be termed a re- 
quiem, "Annabel Lee" is a tuneful dirge, — the sim- 
plest of Poe's melodies, and the most likely to please 
the common ear. It is said to have been his last 
lyric, and was written, I think, with more spontaneity 
than others. The theme is carried along skilfully, 
the movement hastened and heightened to the end 
and there dwelt upon, as often in a piece of music. 
Before considering the poet's method of song, I will 
mention the two poems which seem to me to repre- 
sent his highest range, and sufficient in themselves to 
preserve the memory of a lyrist. 

We overlook the allegory of "The Haunted Pal- 
ace," until it has been read more than once ; we 
think of the sound, the phantasmagoric picture, the 
beauty, the lurid close. The magic muse of Cole- 
ridge, in " Kubla Khan," or elsewhere, hardly went 
beyond such lines as these : — 

" Banners yellow, glorious, golden, 

On its roof did float and flow, 
(This — all this — was in the olden 

Time long ago ; ) 
And every gentle air that dallied, 

In that sweet day, 
Along the ramparts, plumed and pallid, 

A winged odor went away." 

The conception of a " Lost Mind " never has been so 
imaginatively treated, whether by poet or by painter. 
Questioning Poe's own mental state, look at this poem 
and see how sane, as an artist, he was that made it. 
" Do you act best when you forget yourself in the 
part ? " " No, for then I forget to perfect the part." 



'•'•Annabel 
Lee:' 



Poe's 
higJiest 
lyrical 
rafige. 



" T/ie 

Haunted 

Palace:'' 



248 



EDGAR ALLAN POE. 



^'Isra/eiy 



Even more striking 
heart-strings 



the song of 



" Israfel," whose 



is 
are a lute. Of all these lyrics is not 
this the most lyrical, — not only charged with music, 
but with light ? For once, and in his freest hour of 
youth, Poe got above the sepulchres and mists, even 
beyond the pale-faced moon, and visited the empyrean. 
There is joy in this carol, and the radiance of the 
skies, and ecstatic possession of the gift of song : — 

" If I could dwell 
Where Israfel 

Hath dwelt, and he where I, 
He might not sing so wildly well 

A mortal melody, 
While a bolder note than this might .swell 

From my lyre within the sky ! " 

All this, with the rapturous harmony of the first and 
third stanzas, is awakened in the poet's soul by a 
line from a discourse on the Koran, and the result is 
even finer than the theme. If I had any claim to 
make up a " Parnassus," not perhaps of the most 
famous English lyrics, but of those which appeal 
strongly to my own poetic sense, and could select 
but one of Poe's, I confess that I should choose 
" Israfel," for pure music, for exaltation, and for its 
original, satisfying quality of rhythmic art. 



A n exqui- 
site but lint ■ 
ited fac- 
ulty. 



IV. 

Few and brief are these reliquice. which determine 
his fame as a poet. What do they tell us of his 
lyrical genius and method ? Clearly enough, that he 
possessed an exquisite faculty, which he exercised 
within definite bounds. It may be that within those 
bounds he would have done more if events had not 
hindered him, as he declared, " from making any se« 



'RHYTHMICAL CREATION OF BEAUTY: 



249 



rious effort" in the field of his choice, lii boyhood 
he had decided views as to the province of song, and 
he never afterward changed them. The preface to 
his West Point edition, rambling and conceited as it 
is, — affording such a contrast to the proud humility 
of Keats's preface to " Endymion," — gives us the 
gist of his creed, and shows that the instinct of the 
young poet was scarcely less delicate than that of his 
nobler kinsman. Poe thought the object of poetry 
was pleasure, not truth ; the pleasure must not be 
definite, but subtile, and therefore poetry is opposed 
to romance ; music is an essential, " since the compre- 
hension of sweet sound is our most indefinite concep- 
tion." , Metaphysics in verse he hated, pronouncing 
the Lake theory a new form, of didacticism that had i 
injured even the tuneful Coleridge. For a neophyte 
this was not bad, and after certain reservations few 
will disagree with him. Eighteen years later, in his 
charming lecture, " The Poetic Principle," he offered 
simply an extension of these ideas, with reasons why 
a long poem " cannot exist." One is tempted to re- 
join that the standard of length in a poem, as in a 
piece of music, is relative, depending upon the power 
of the maker and the recipient to prolong their ex- 
alted moods. We might, also, quote Lander's " Pen- 
tameron," concerning the greatness of a poet, or even 
Beecher's saying that " pint measures are soon filled." 
The lecture justly denounces the " heresy of the didac- 
tic," and then declares poetry to be the child of Taste, 
— devoted solely to the Rhythmical Creation of 
Beauty, as it is in music that the soul most nearly 
attains the supernal end for which it struggles. In 
fine, Poe, with "the mad pride of intellectuality," re- 
fused to look beyond the scope of his own gift, and 
would restrict the poet to one method and even to a 



Poe'^s 
tJieory 0/ 
poetry. 



Cp. " Vic- 
torian 
Poets " : 
A 127. 



" TJie 
Poetic 
Principle^ 

1845. 



The 

RhytJinii- 
cal Crea- 
iiofi 0/ 
Beauty. 



250 



EDGAR ALLAN POE. 



A melo- 
dist. 



The re- 
frain and 
repetend. 



single theme. In his ex post facto analysis of " The 
Raven " he conceives the highest tone of beauty to 
be sadness, caused by the pathos of existence and our 
inability to grasp the unknown. Of all beauty that 
of a beautiful woman is the supremest, her death is 
the saddest loss — and therefore " the most poetical 
topic in the world." He would treat this musically 
by application of the refrain, increasing the sorrowful 
loveliness of his poem by contrast of something home- 
ly, fantastic, or quaint. 

Poe's own range was quite within his theory. His 
juvenile versions of what afterward became poems were 
so very " indefinite " as to express almost nothing ; 
they resembled those marvellous stanzas of Dr. Chiv- 
ers, that sound magnificently, —I have heard Bayard 
Taylor and Swinburne rehearse them with shouts of 
delight — and that have no meaning at all. Poe could 
not remain a Chivers, but sound always was his forte. 
We rarely find his highest imagination in his verse, or 
the creation of poetic phrases such as came to the lips 
of Keats without a summons. He lacked the dramatic 
power of combination, and produced no symphony in 
rhythm, — was strictly a melodist, who achieved won- 
ders in a single strain. Neither Mrs. Browning nor any 
other poet had " applied " the refrain in Poe's fashion, 
nor so effectively. In " The Bells " its use is limited 
almost to one word, the only English word, perhaps, 
that could be repeated incessantly as the burden of 
such a poem. In " The Raven," " Lenore," and else- 
where, he employed the repetend also, and with still 
more novel results : — 

"An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young, 
A dirge for her, the doubly dead, in that she died so young." 

"Our talk had been serious and sober, 



A POET OF ONE MOOD. 



■5r 



But our thoughts they were i)alsicc.l and sere, 
Our memories were treacherous and sere." 

One thing profitably may be noted by latter-day 
poets. Poe used none but elementary English meas- 
ures, relying upon his music and atmosphere for their 
effect. This is true of those which seem most intri- 
cate, as in "TheEells" and " Ulalume." " Lenore " 
and " For Annie " are the simplest of ballad forms. 
I have a fancy that our Southern poet's ear caught 
the music of " iVnnabel Lee" and " Eulalie," if not 
their special quality, from the plaintive, melodious 
negro songs utilized by those early writers of " min- 
strelsy " who have been denominated the only com- 
posers of a genuine American school. This sugges- 
tion may be scouted, but an expert might suspect the 
one to be a patrician refinement upon the melody, 
feeling, and humble charm of the other. 

Poe was not a single-poem poet, but the poet of a 
single mood. His materials were seemingly a small 
stock in trade, chiefly of Angels and Demons, with an 
attendance of Dreams, Echoes, Ghouls, Gnomes and 
Mimes, ready at hand. He selected or coined, for use 
and re-use, a number of what have been called " beau- 
tiful words," — "albatross," "halcyon," " scintillant," 
"Ligeia," "Weir," "Yaanek," " Auber," "D'Elormie," 
and the like. Everything was subordinate to sound. 
But his poetry, as it places us under the spell of the 
senses, enables us to enter, through their reaction upon 
the spirit, his indefinable mood ; nor should we forget 
that Coleridge owes his specific rank as a poet, not 
to his philosophic verse, but to melodious fragments, 
and greatly to the rhythm of "The Ancient Mariner" 
and of " Christabel." Poe's melodies lure us to the 
point where we seem to hear angelic lutes and cith- 
erns, or elfin instruments that make music in " the 



Use of 
shnplc bal- 
lad forms. 



Effects of 
sou7id. 



252 



EDGAR ALLAN POE. 



Poe most 
eminent 
as a ro- 
tnancer. 



land east of the sun and west of the moon." The 
enchantment may not be that of Israfel, nor of the 
harper who exorcised the evil genius of Saul, but it is 
at least that of some plumed being of the middle air, 
of a charmer charming so sweetly that his numbers 
are the burden of mystic dreams. 

V. 

If Poe's standing depended chiefly upon these few 
poems, notable as they are, his name would be re- 
called less frequently. His intellectual strength and 
rarest imagination are to be found in his Tales. To > 
them, and to literary criticism, his main labors were 
devoted. 

The limits of this chapter constrain me to say less 
than I have in mind concerning his prose writings. 
As with his poems, so with the "Tales," — their dates 
are of little importance. His irregular life forced him 
to alternate good work with bad, and some of his best 
stories were written early. He was an apostle of the 
art that refuses to take its color from a given time or 
country, and of the revolt against commonplace, and 
his inventions partook of the romantic and the won- 
derful. He added to a Greek perception of form the 
Oriental passion for decoration. All the materials of 
the wizard's craft were at his command. He was not 
a pupil of Beckford, Godwin, Maturin, Hoffman, or 
Fouque ; and yet if these writers were to be grouped 
we should think also of Poe, and give him no second 
place among them. " The young fellow is highly imag- 
inative, and a little given to the terrific," said Ken- 
nedy, in his honest way. Poe could not have written 
a novel, as we term it, as well as the feeblest of Har- 
per's or Roberts's yearlings. He vibrated between two 



Revolt 
against the 
tomnion- 
place. 



INTELLECTUAL DEXTERITY. 



253 



points, the realistic and the mystic, and \\\a(\^ no at- 
tempt to combine people or situations in ordinary life, 
though he knew how to lead up to a dramatic tableau 
or crisis. His studies of character were not made 
from observation, but from acquaintance with himself; 
and this subjectivity, or egoism, crippled his inven- 
tion and made his "Tales" little better than prose 
poems. He could imagine a series of adventures — 
the experience of a single narrator — like " Arthur 
Gordon Pym," and might have been, not Le Sage nor 
De Foe, but an eminent raconteur in his own field. 
His strength is unquestionable in those clever pieces 
of ratiocination, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," 
" The Mystery of Marie Roget," " The Purloined Let- 
ter"; in some of a more fantastic type, "The Gold 
Bug " and " Hans Pfaall " ; and especially in those with 
elements of terror and morbid psychology added, such 
as "The Descent into the Maelstrom," "The Black 
Cat," "The Tell-tale Heart," and the mesmeric 
sketches. When composing these he delighted in the 
exercise of his dexterous intellect, like a workman 
testing his skill. No poet is of a low grade who pos- 
sesses, besides an ear for rhythm, the resources of 
a brain so fine and active. Technical gifts being 
equal, the more intellectual of two poets is the greater. 
" Best bard, because the wisest." 

His artistic contempt for metaphysics is seen even 
in those tales which appear most transcendental. 
They are charged with a feeling that in the realms 
of psychology we are dealing with something ethereal, 
which is none the less substance if we might but cap- 
ture it. They are his resolute attempts to find a clew 
to the invisible world. Were he living now, how much 
he would make of our discoveries in light and sound, 
of the correlation of forces ! He strove by a kind of 



Renlistn 
and inysti- 
cisvi. 



Psycho- 
logic anal' 
ysis. 



Contempt 
for nteta 
physics. 



254 



EDGAR ALLAN POE. 



Master- 
pieces. 



Poe and 

flaw- 

ihorne. 



divination to put his hand upon the Hnks of mind 
and matter, and reach the hiding-places of the soul. 
It galled him that anything should lie outside the do- 
main of human intelligence. His imperious intellect 
rebelled against the bounds that shut us in, and found 
passionate expression in works of which " Ligeia," 
"The Fall of the House of Usher," and "WiUiam 
Wilson" are the best types. The tales in which lyrics 
are introduced are full of complex beauty, the choicest 
products of his genius. They are the offspring of 
yearnings that lifted him so far above himself as to 
make us forget his failings and think of him only as 
a creative artist, a man of noble gifts. 

In these short, purely ideal efforts — finished as an 
artist finishes a portrait, or a poet his poem — Poe had 
few equals in recent times. That he lacked sustained 
power of invention is proved, not by his failure to com- 
plete an extended work, but by his under-estimation of 
its value. Such a man measures everything by his per- 
sonal ability, and finds plausible grounds for the re- 
sulting standard. Hawthorne had the growing power 
and the staying power that gave us " The Scarlet 
Letter " and " The House of the Seven Gables." Poe 
and Hawthorne were the last of the romancers. Each 
was a master in his way, and that of Poe was the 
more obvious and material. He was expert in much 
that concerns the structure of works, and the model- 
ling touches of the poet left beauty-marks upon his 
prose. Yet in spiritual meaning his tales were less 
poetic than those of Hawthorne. He relied upon his 
externals, making the utmost of their gorgeousness of 
color, their splendor and gloom of light and shade. 
Hawthorne found the secret meaning of common things, 
and knew how to capture, from the plainest aspects of 
life, an essence of evasive beauty which the senses of 



COMPARED WITH II .\ U'TI lORNE. 



255 



Poe often were unable to perceive. It was Hawthorne 
who heard the melodies too fine for mortal ear. Haw- 
thorne was wholly masculine, with the great tenderness 
and gentleness which belong to virile souls. Poe had, 
with the delicacy, the sophistry and weakness of a 
nature more or less effeminate. He opposed to Haw- 
thorne the fire, the richness, the instability of the trop- 
ics, as against the abiding strength and passion of the 
North. His own conceptions astonished him, and he 
often presents himself " with hair on end, at his ow^n 
wonders." Of these two artists and seers, the New 
Englander had the profounder insight ; the South- 
erner's magic was that of the necromancer who re- 
sorts to spells and devices, and, when some apparition 
by chance responds to his incantations, is bewildered 
by the phantom himself has raised. 

Poe failed to see that the Puritanism by which Haw- 
thorne's strength was tempered was also the source 
from which it sprang ; and in his general criticism did 
not pay full tribute to a genius he must have felt. In 
some of his sketches, such as " The Man of the 
Crowd," he used Hawthorne's method, and with infe- 
rior results. His reviews of other authors and his 
occasional literary notes have been so carefully pre- 
served as to show his nature by a mental and moral 
photograph. His Marginalia^ scrappy and written for 
effect, are the notes of a thinking man of letters. The 
criticisms raised a hubbub in their day, and made Poe 
the bogy of his generation — the unruly censor whom 
weaklings not only had cause to fear, but often re- 
garded with a sense of cruel injustice. I acknowledge 
their frequent dishonesty, vulgarity, prejudice, but do 
not, therefore, hold them to be worthless. Even a 
scourge, a pestilence, has its uses ; before it the puny 
and frail go down, the fittest survive. And so it was in 



" Margv 
Alalia.''} 



256 



EDGAR ALLAN POE. 



" The Lit- 
er atL'''' 



cp.pp. 

42-44- 



Sahre. 



Poe's foray. Better that a time of unproductiveness 
should follow such a thinning out than that false and 
feeble things should continue. I suspect that T^e 
Literati made room for a new movement, sure though 
long delayed, in American authorship. Mr. Higgin- 
son, however, is entirely right when he intimates that 
Margaret Fuller, by her independent reviews in " The 
Tribune," sustained her full and early part in the 
chase against " such small deer." The shafts of Dian 
were more surely sped, and much less vindictively, than 
the spear of her brother-huntsman. Poe's sketches are 
a prose Dunciad, waspish and unfair, yet not without 
touches of magnanimity. He had small respect for the 
feeling that it is well for a critic to discover beauties, 
since any one can point out faults. When, as in the 
cases of Tennyson, Mrs. Browning, Taylor, and others, 
he pronounced favorably upon the talents of a claim- 
ant, and was uninfluenced by personal motives, his 
judgments not seldom have been justified by the after- 
career. Besides, what a cartoon he drew of the writers 
of his time, — the corrective of Griswold's optimistic 
delineations ! In the description of a man's personal 
appearance he had the art of placing the subject before 
us with a single touch. His tender mercies were cruel \ 
he never forgot to prod the one sore spot of the author 
he most approved, — was especially intolerant of his 
own faults in others, and naturally detected these at 
once. When meting out punishment to a pretentious 
writer, he revelled in his task, and often made short 
work, as if the pleasure was too great to be endurable. 
The keenness of his satire, just or unjust, is mitigated 
by its obvious ferocity : one instinctively takes part 
with the victim. Nothing in journalistic criticism, even 
at that time, was more scathing and ludicrous than his 
conceit of a popular bookwright in the act of confabu 



GENERAL TRAITS AND EQUIPMENT. 



257 



lation with the Universe. But he marred the work by 
coarseness, telling one man that he was by no means a 
fool, although he did write " De Vere," and heading a 
paper on the gentlest and most forbearing of poets — 
"Mr. Longfellow and other Plagiarists." In short, he 
constantly dulled the edge and temper of his rapier, 
and resorted to the broad-axe, using the latter even in 
his deprecation of its use by Kit North. Perhaps it 
was needed in those salad days by offenders who could 
be put down in no other wise ; but I hold it a sign of 
progress that criticism by force of arms would now be 
less effective. 

VI. 

Some analysis of Poe's general equipment will not 
be out of place. Only in the most perfect tales can 
his English style be called excellent, however signifi- 
cant his thought. His mannerisms — constant employ- 
ment of the dash for suggestiveness, and a habit of 
italicizing to make a point or strengthen an illusion — 
are wearisome, and betray a lack of confidence in his 
skill to use plain methods. While asserting the power 
of words to convey absolutely any idea of the human 
mind, he relied on sound, quaintness, surprise, and 
other artificial aids. His prose is inferior to Haw- 
thorne^s ; but sometimes he excels Hawthorne in qual- 
ities of form and proportion which are specially at 
the service of authors who are also poets. The abrupt 
beginnings of his stories often are artistic : — 

"We had now reached the summit of the loftiest crafr. 
For some minutes the old man seemed too much exhausted 
to speak." (" Descent into the Maelstrom.") 

" The thousand injuries of Fortunate I had borne as best 
I could ; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed re- 
venge." (" The Cask of Amontillado."/ 
17 



Broad- 
axc criti- 
cism. 



Poe's 
equipm£tit 
afid 
ge7iius. 



258 



EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 



«* The 

Fall of the 
House of 
Usher.'''' 



Balzac. 



Poe''s im- 
agination. 



Thefan- 
iastic. 



Deficient 
{k humor. 



His endings were equally good, when he had a clear 
knowledge of his own purpose, and some of his con- 
ceptions terminate at a dramatic crisis. The tone, 
also, of his masterpieces is well sustained through- 
out. In "The Fall of the House of Usher," the ap- 
proach to the fated spot, the air, the landscape, the 
tarn, the mansion itself, are a perfect study, equal to 
the ride of Childe Roland, — and here Poe excels 
Browning : we not only come with him to the dark 
tower, but we enter and partake its mystery, and alone 
know the secret of its accursed fate. The poet's ana- 
lytic faculty has been compared to that of Balzac, but 
a parallel goes no farther than the material side. In 
condensation he surpassed either Balzac or Haw- 
thorne. 

His imagination was not of the highest order, for 
he never dared to trust to it implicitly ; certainly not 
in his poetry, since he could do nothing with a meas- 
ure like blank verse, which is barren in the hands of a 
mere songster, but the glory of English metrical forms 
when employed by one commanding the strength of 
diction, the beauty and grandeur of thought, and all 
the resources of a strongly imaginative poet. Nei- 
ther in verse nor in prose did he cut loose from his 
minor devices, and for results of sublimity and awe he 
always depends upon that which is grotesque or out 
of nature. Beauty of the fantastic or grotesque is not 
the highest beauty. Art, like nature, must be fantas- 
tic, not in her frequent, but in her exceptional moods. 
The rarest ideal dwells in a realm beyond that which 
fascinates us by its strangeness or terror, and the vo- 
taries of the latter have masters above them as high 
as Raphael is above Dore. 

In genuine humor Poe seemed utterly wanting. He 
also had little of the mother-wit that comes in flashes 



COMMAND OF THE GROTESQUE. 



259 



and at once ; but his powers of irony and satire were 
so great as to make his frequent hipses into invective 
the more humiliating. The command of humor has 
distinguished men whose genius was bodi high and 
broad. If inessential to exalted poetic work, its ab- 
sence is hurtful to the critical and polemic essay. Poe 
knew this as well as any one, but a measureless self- 
esteem would not acknowledge the Haw in his armor. 
Hence efforts which involved the delusion that humor 
may come by works and not by inborn gift. Humor 
is congenital and rare, the fruit of natural mellowness, 
of sensitiveness to the light and humane phases of life. 
It is, moreover, set in action by an unselfish heart. 
Such is the mirth of Thackeray, of Cervantes and Mo- 
liere, and of the one master of English song. Poe's 
consciousness of his defect, and his refusal to believe 
it incurable, are manifest in trashy sketches for which 
he had a market, and which are humorous only to one 
who sees the ludicrous side of their failure. He ana- 
lyzed mirth as the product of incongruity, and went 
to work upon a theory to produce it. The result is 
seen not only in the extravaganzas to which I refer, 
— and it is a pity that these should have been hunted 
up so laboriously, — but in the use of what he thought 
was humor to barb his criticisms, and as a contrast 
to the exciting passages of his analytical tales. One 
of his sketches, " The Due de I'Omelette," after the 
lighter French manner, has grace and jaunty persiflage, 
but most of his whimsical " pot-boilers " are deplor- 
ably absurd. There is something akin to humor in the 
sub-handling of his favorite themes, — such as the awe 
and mystery of death, the terrors of pestilence, insan- 
ity, or remorse. The grotesque and nether side of 
these matters presents itself to him, and then his irony, 
with its repulsive fancies, is as near humor as he ever 



Quality of 
the great 
htnnorists. 
Cp. " Vic- 
torian 
Poets'' : 
PP- 111 77- 



The gro 
iesque. 



26o 



EDGAR ALLAN POE. 



Character 
of his 
scholar- 
ship. 



Affecta- 
tion of 
learning. 



A good 

reference- 

hnowledge. 



approaches. That is to say, it is grave-yard humor, 
the kind which sends a cliill down our backs, and 
impHes a contempt for our bodies and souls, for the 
perils, helplessness, and meanness of the stricken hu- 
man race. 

Foe is sometimes called a man of extraordinary 
learning. Upon a first acquaintance, one might re- 
ceive the impression that his scholarship was not only 
varied, but thorough. A study of his works has satis- 
fied me that he possessed literary resources and knew 
how to make the most of them. In this he resembled 
Bulwer, and, with far less abundant materials than the 
latter required, employed them as speciously. He 
easily threw a glamour of erudition about his work, 
by the use of phrases from old authors he had read, 
or among whose treatises he had foraged with special 
design. It was his knack to cull sentences which, 
taken by themselves, produce a weird or impressive 
effect, and to reframe them skilfully. This plan was 
clever, and resulted in something that could best be 
muttered " darkly, at dead of night " ; but it partook 
of trickery, even in its art. He had little exact schol- 
arship, nor needed it, dealing, as he did, not with the 
processes of learning, but with results that could sub- 
serve the play of his imagination. Shakespeare's 
anachronisms and illusions were made as he required 
them, and with a fine disdain. Poe resorted to them 
of malice aforethought, and under pretence of correct- 
ness. Still, the work of a romancer and poet is not 
that of a book-worm. What he needs is a good ref- 
erence-knowledge, and this Poe had. His irregular 
school-boy training was not likely to give him the 
scholastic habit, nor would his impatient manhood 
otherwise have confirmed it. I am sure that we may 
consider that portion of his youth to have been oi 



ROMANTIC MATER FA LS. 



261 



most worth which was devoted, as in the case of many 
a born W4"iter, to the unconscious education obtained 
from the reading, for the mere love of it, of all books 
to which he had access. This training served him 
well It enabled him to give his romance an alchemic 
air, by citation from writers like Chapman, Thomas 
More, Bishop King, etc., and from Latin and French 
authors in profusion. His French tendencies were 
natural, and he learned enough of the language to 
read much of its current literature and get hold of 
modes unknown to many of his fellow-writers. I have 
said that his stock in trade was narrow, but for the 
adroit display of it examine any of his tales and 
sketches, — for example, " Berenice," or '^ The Assig- 
nation." 

In knowledge of what may be called the properties 
of his romance, he was more honestly grounded. He 
had the good fortune to utilize the Southern life and 
scenery wdiich he knew in youth. It chanced, also, 
that during some years of his boyhood — that forma- 
tive period whose impressions are indelible — he lived 
in a characteristic part of England. He had seen 
with his own eyes castles, abbeys, the hangings and 
tapestries and other by-gone trappings of ancient 
rooms, and remembered effects of decoration and color 
which always came to his aid. These he used as if 
he were born to them ; never, certainly, with the sur- 
prise at their richness wdiich vulgarizes Disraeli's " Lo- 
thair." In some way, known to genius, he also caught 
the romance of France, of Italy, of the Orient, and 
one tale or another is transfused wdth their atmos- 
phere ; while the central figure, however disguised, is 
always the image of the romancer himself. His equip- 
ment, on the whole, was not a pedant's, much less that 
of a searcher after truth ; it was that of a poet and 



His ■ma- 
terials. 



262 



EDGAR ALLAN POE. 



^'Eureka : 
9. Prose 
Poetii'^'' 
1848. 



A lay- 
man's im- 
aginative 
venture. 
Cp. " Vic- 
torian 
Poets " ; 
fp. 19, 20. 



Poetic in' 
aluction. 



a literary workman. Yet he had the hunger which 
animates the imaginative student, and, had he been 
led to devote himself to science, would have contrib- 
uted to the sum of knowledge. In writing Eureka he 
was unquestionably sincere, and forgot himself more 
nearly than in any other act of his professional lifCo 
But here his inexact learning betrayed him. What 
was begun in conviction — a swift generalization from 
scientific theories of the universe — grew to be so far 
beyond the data at his command, or so inconsistent 
with them, that he finally saw he had written little 
else than a prose poem, and desired that it should be 
so regarded. Of all sciences, astronomy appeals most 
to the imagination. What is rational in " Eureka " 
mostly is a re-statement of accepted theories : other- 
wise the treatise is vague and nebulous, — a light 
dimmed by its own vapor. The work is curiously sat- 
urated with our modern Pantheism ; and although in 
many portions it shows the author's weariness, yet it 
was a notable production for a layman venturing within 
the precincts of the savant. The poetic instinct hits 
upon truths which the science of the future confirms ; 
but as often, perhaps, it glorifies some error sprung 
from a too ardent generalization. Poe's inexactness 
was shown in frequent slips, — sometimes made un- 
consciously, sometimes in reliance upon the dulness 
of his rivals to save him from detection. He was on 
the alert for other people's errors ; for his own facts, 
were he now alive, he could not call so lightly upon 
his imagination. Even our younger authors, here and 
abroad, now are so well equipped that their learning 
seems to handicap their winged steeds. Poe had, 
above all, the gift of poetic induction. He would have 
divined the nature of an unknown world from a speci- 
men of its flora, a fragment of its art. He felt himself 



A FOE TO DIDACTICISM. 



263 



something more than a bookman. He was a creator 
of the beautiful, and hence the conscious struggle of 
his spirit for the sustenance it craved. Even when he 
was most in error, he labored as an artist, and it is 
idle criticism that judges him upon an}^ other ground. 
Accept him, then, whether as poet or romancer, as 
a pioneer of the art feeling in American literature. 
So far as he was devoted to art for art's sake, it was 
for her sake as the exponent of beauty. No man 
ever lived in whom the passion for loveliness more 
plainly governed the emotions and convictions. His 
service of the beautiful was idolatry, and he would 
have kneeled with Heine at the feet of Our Lady of 
Milo, and believed that she yearned to help him. 
This consecration to absolute beauty made him abhor 
the mixture of sentimentalism, metaphysics, and mor- 
als, in its presentation. It was a foregone conclusion 
that neither Longfellow, Emerson, Lowell, nor Haw- 
thorne should wholly satisfy him. The question of 
" moral " tendency concerned him not in the least. 
He did not feel with Keats that " Beauty is truth, 
truth beauty," and that a divine perfection may be 
reached by either road. This deficiency narrowed his 
range both as a poet and as a critic. His sense of 
justice was a sense of the fitness of things, and — 
strange to say — when he put it aside he forgot that 
he was doing an unseemly thing. Otherwise, he rep- 
resents, or was one of the first to lead, a rebellion 
against formalism, commonplace, the spirit of the 
bourgeois. In this movement Whitman is his coun- 
tertype at the pole opposite from tliat of art ; and 
hence they justly are picked out from the rest of us 
and associated in foreign minds. Taste was Poe's 
supreme faculty. Beauty, to him, was a definite and 
\ogical reality, and he would have scouted Veron's 



Poe^s ab- 
solute love 
of beauty. 



His protest 
against di 
dacticism. 



Tasta. 



264 



EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 



Isolation. 



Decorative 



d tragedy. 



A singular 
?Md pa- 
hetic 
iareer. 



claim that it has no fixed objective laws, and exists 
only in the nature of the observer. Although the 
brakes of art were on his imagination, his taste was 
not wholly pure j he vacillated between the classic 
forms and those allied with color, splendor, Oriental 
decoration ; between his love for the antique and his 
impressions of the mystical and grotesque. But he 
was almost without confraternity. An artist in an 
unartistic period, he had to grope his way, to con- 
tend with stupidity and coarseness. Again, his imag- 
ination, gloating upon the possibilities of taste, vio- 
lated its simplicity. Poe longed for the lamp of 
Aladdin, for the riches of the Gnomes. Had un- 
bounded wealth been his, he would have outvied 
Beckford, Landor, Dumas, in barbaric extravagance 
of architecture. His efforts to apply the laws of the 
beautiful to imaginary decoration, architecture, land- 
scape, are very fascinating as seen in '' The Philoso- 
phy of Furniture," "Landscape Gardening," and "Lan- 
der's Cottage." " The Domain of Arnheim " is a 
marvellous dream of an earthly paradise, and the 
close is a piece of word-painting as effective as the 
language contains. Regarding this sensitive artist, 
this original poet, it seems indeed a tragedy that a 
man so ideal in either realm, so unfit for contact 
with ugliness, dulness, brutality, should have come to 
eat husks with the swine, to be misused by their hu- 
man counterparts, and to die the death of a drunk- 
ard, in the refuge which society offers to the most 
forlorn and hopeless of its castaways. 

VIL 

Seeking our illustrations of the poetic life, we find 
no career of more touching and peculiar interest than 



HIS LITERARY EXECUTOR. 



265 



that of Poe. It is said that disaster followed him 
even after death, in the vicious memoir which Gris- 
wold prefixed to his collected works ; and doubtless 
the poet should have had for his biographer a man 
of kind and healthy discernment, like Kennedy, his 
townsman and generous friend. Yet Poe showed tact 
in choosing Griswold, and builded better than he 
knew. He could select no more indefatigable book- 
wright to bring together his scattered writings, and 
he counted upon Death's paying all debts. In this 
Poe was mistaken. For once Griswold wrote as he 
thought and felt, and his memoir, however spiteful 
and unchivalrous, w^as more sincere than many of the 
sycophantic sketches in the bulky volumes of his 
"Poets and Poetry." Malice made him eloquent, and 
an off-hand obituary notice of the poet was the most 
nervous piece of work that ever came from his pen. 
It was heartless, and, in some respects, inaccurate. 
It brought so much w-rath upon him that he became 
vindictive, and followed it up with a memoir, which, 
as an exhibition of the ignoble nature of its author, 
scarcely has a parallel. Did this in the end affect 
Poe's fame injuriously.'' Far otherwise; it moved a 
host of writers, beginning with Willis and Graham, 
to recall his habit of life, and reveal the good side 
of it. Some have gone as far in eulogy as Griswold 
went toward the opposite extreme. It seemed a cruel 
irony of fate that Poe's own biographer should plant 
thorns upon his grave, but he also planted laurels. 
He paid an unstinted tribute to the poet's genius, 
and this was the only concession which Poe himself 
would care to demand. With sterner irony. Time 
brings in his revenges ! In a familiar edition of the 
poet's works, for which Griswold laid ihe ground- 
work, the memoir by Ingram is devoted largely to 



Griswold''^ 
memoir. 



Effect 
upon Poe^i 
fame. 



266 



EDGAR ALLAN POE. 



Foe's 

habits and 
iempera- 
ntent. 



Love of 
the ideal a 
restraiut 
upon sen- 
iuality. 



Chastity of 
Poe''s writ- 
ings. 



correcting the errors of the Doctor's long-since ex- 
cluded sketch, and to exposing every act of malice 
against Poe which Griswold committed, either before 
or after his foeman's death. 

After years of censure and defence, and in the light 
of his own writings, the poet's character is not " be- 
yond all conjecture." Here was a man of letters who 
fulfilled the traditions of a past century in this western 
world and modern time ; one over-possessed and ham- 
pered by the very temperament that made him a poet 
— and this, too, when he thought himself deliberate 
and calculating. His head was superbly developed, 
his brain-power too great for its resources of supply 
and control. The testimony of some who knew his 
home-life is that he was tender and lovable, Graham 
and Willis aver that he was patient and regular in 
work, and scrupulous to return a just amount of labor 
for value received. But many who knew and be- 
friended him have spoken, more in sorrow than in 
anger, of his treachery and thanklessness, of his in- 
justice to himself, and of the degrading excesses 
which plunged him into depths from which it grew 
more and more difficult to lift him. 

Nevertheless, Poe was not a man of immoral habits. 
I assert that scholars, writers, and artists, in spite of 
a tradition to the contrary, are less given, as a class, 
to forbidden pleasures than business-men and idle men 
of the world. Study and a love of the ideal protect 
them against the sensuality by which too many dull 
the zest of their appetites. Poe was no exception to 
the rule. He was not a libertine. Woman was to 
him the impersonation of celestial beauty, her influence 
soothed and elevated him, and in her presence he was 
gentle, winning, and subdued. There is not an un- 
chaste suggestion in the whole course of his writings, 



HEREDITY AND CIRCUMSTANCE. 



267 



— a remarkable fact, in view of his acquaintance with 
the various schools of French literature. His works 
are_ almost too spiritual. Not of the earth, earthy, 
their personages meet with the rapture and co-absorp- 
tion of disembodied souls. His verse and prose ex- 
press devotion to Beauty in her most ethereal guise, 
and he justly might cry out with Shelley : — 

" I vowed that I would dedicate my powers 
To thee and thine ; have I not kept the vow ? " 

Nor was he undevotional. His sense of the sublime 
and mystical filled him with thoughts of other worlds 
and existences than ours ; if there is pride, there is 
reverence, in his bold imaginings. He felt a spark of 
the divine lire within him, and the pride of his intel- 
lectual disdain was, like the Titan's, a not inglorious 
sin. Penally, Poe was not an habitual drunkard. He 
had woful fits of drunkenness, varying in frequency, 
and sometimes of degradation ; for a single glass made 
him the easy prey of any coarse and pitiless hands 
into which he might fall. He was a man inebriate 
when sober, his brain surging with emotion, and a 
stimulant that only served to steady common men 
bewildered him. As with women, the least contami- 
nation was to him debasement. His mature years 
were a battle with inherited taint, and there were long 
periods in which he was the victor. This taint had 
been increased by drugging in infancy, and by the 
convivial usages of his guardian's household. Bear- 
ing in mind, also, the lack of self-control inherent in 
Celtic and Southern natures, I think he made a plucky 
fight. \ The duty of self-support was not one to which 
he had been trained, and was more than he could bear. 
Imagine Shelley, who made his paper boats of bank- 
notes, Byron and Landor, who had their old estates, 



Not a 
scoffer nor 
ati habit- 
ual drunk- 
ard. 



His hered' 
iiary tai?it. 



N 



268 



EDGAR ALLAN POE. 



Effects of 
■poverty. 
Cp. " Vic- 
torian 
Poets " ; 
?). 8i. 



His sensi- 
iive tem- 
perament. 



forced to write by the column for their weekly board. 
" Poverty has this disease: through want it teaches a 
man evil." More, it limits the range of his possibili- 
ties. Doudan has said, with truth and feeling, that 
he who is without security for the morrow can neither 
meditate upon nor accomplish a lasting work. The 
delicate fancies of certain writers are not always at 
quick command, and the public is loath to wait and 
pay for quality. Poe, more than once, fell into dis- 
grace by not being able to meet his literary engage- 
ments on time. His most absurd and outrageous 
articles, such as the one put forth after his Boston 
lecture, were the bluster of a man who strove to hide 
a sense of humiliation and failure. Doubtless, he se- 
cretly invoked the gods in his own behalf. He knew, 
like Chenier going to his death, that it was a pity — 
he was worth saving. Generous efforts, in truth, were 
made to save him, by strong and tender friends, but 
these were quite in vain. He carried a death-warrant 
within him. Well might he feel that a spell was on 
him, and in one tale and another try to make the 
world — • which he affected to despise — comprehend 
its fatality, and bespeak the sympathetic verdict of 
the future upon his defeat and doom. 

It is just that well-balanced persons should rebuke 
the failings of genius. But let such an one imagine 
himself with a painfully sensitive organization, — " all 
touch, all eye, all ear " ; with appetites almost resist- 
less ; with a frame in which health and success breed 
a dangerous rapture, disease and sorrow a fatal de- 
spair. Surmount all this with a powerful intelligence 
that does not so much rule the structure as it menaces 
it, and threatens to shake it asunder. Let him con* 
ceive himself as adrift, from the first, among adverse 
surroundings, now combating his environment, now 



HIS UNMORALITY. 



269 



struggling to adjust himself to it. He, too, might 
find his judgment a broken reed ; his passions might 
get the upper hand ; his perplexities bring him to 
shamelessness and ruin. It was thus the poet's curse 
came upon him, and the wings of his Psyche were 
sorrowfully trailed in the dust. I have said to friends 
as they sneered at the ill-managed life of one whose 
special genius perhaps could not exist but in union 
with certain infirmities, that instead of recounting,, 
these, and deriding them, they should hedge him round 
with their protection. We can find more than one 
man of sense among a thousand, but how rarely a 
poet with such a gift ! When he has gone his music 
will linger, and be precious to those who never have 
heard, like ourselves, the sweet bells jangled. 

Making every allowance, Poe was terribly blam- 
able. We all are misunderstood, and all condemned 
to toil. The sprites have their task-work, and can- 
not always be dancing in the moonlight. At times, 
we are told, they have to consort with what is ugly, 
and even take on its guise. Unhappily, Poe was the 
reverse of one who " fortune's buffets and rewards 
has ta'en with equal thanks." He stood good for- 
tune more poorly than bad ; any emotion would upset 
him, and his worst falls were after successes, or with 
success just in sight. His devotion to beauty was 
eagerly selfish. He had a heart, and in youth was 
loyal to those he loved. In this respect he differed 
from the hero of " A Strange Story," born without 
affection or soul. But his dream was that of " The 
Palace of Art" — a lordly pleasure-house, where taste 
and love should have their fill, regardless of the outer 
world. It has been well said, that if not immoral, 
he was unmoral. With him an end justified the means, 
and he had no conception of the law and limitations 



The p-icc' 
less rarity 
of genius. 



Lack of 
sel/-p<fise. 



Not im- 
itioraly bui 
tvivioral. 



270 



EDGAR ALLAN POE. 



Is genius 
the product 
of neurotic 
disorder ? 



of liberty, no practical sense of right or wrong. At 
the most, he ignored such matters as things irrelevant. 
Now it is not essential that one should have a creed ; 
he may relegate theologies to the regions of the un- 
knowable ; but he must be just in order to fear not, 
and humane that he may be loved ; he must be faith- 
ful to some moral standard of his own, otherwise his 
house, however beautiful and lordly, is founded in the 
sand. . 

The question always will recur, whether, if Poe had 
been able to govern his life aright, he would not also 
have been conventional and tame, and so much the 
less a poet. Were it not for his excesses and neurotic 
crises, should we have had the peculiar quality of his 
art and the works it has left us .'* I cannot here dis- 
cuss the theory that his genius was a frenzy, and that 
poetry is the product of abnormal nerve-vibrations. 
The claim, after all, is a scientific statement of the 
belief that great wits are sure to madness near allied. 
An examination of it involves the whole ground of 
fate, free will, and moral responsibility. I think that 
Poe was bounden for his acts. He never failed to 
resent infringements upon his own manor ; and, how- 
ever poor his self-control, it was not often with him 
that the chord of self passed trembling out of sight. 
Possibly his most exquisite, as they were his most 
poetic, moments, were at those times when he seemed 
very wretched, and avowed himself oppressed by a 
sense of doom. He loved his share of pain, and was 
an instance of the fact that man is the one being that 
takes keen delight in the tragedy of its own existence, 
and for whom 

"Joy is deepest when it springs from woe." 
Wandering among the graves of those he had cher- 



FATAL LACK OF WILL. 



271 



ished, invoking the spectral midnight skies, believing 
himself the Orestes of his race — in all this he was 
fulfilling his nature, deriving the supremest sensations, 
feeding on the plants of night from which such as he 
obtain their sustenance or go famished. They who 
do not perceive this never will comprehend the mys- 
teries of art and song, of the heart from whose re- 
cesses these must be evoked. They err who com- 
miserate Poe for such experiences. My own pity for 
him is of another kind ; it is that which we ever must 
feel for one in whom the rarest possibilities were 
blighted by an inherent lack of will. In his sensi- 
tiveness to impressions like the foregoing, he had at 
once the mood and material for far greater results 
than he achieved. A violin cracks none the sooner 
for being played in a minor key. His instrument 
broke for want of a firm and even hand to use it — 
a virile, devoted master to prolong the strain. 

Poe's demand for his present wish was always 
strong, yet it was the caprice of a child, and not the 
determination that stays and conquers. He was no 
more of an egoist than was Goethe ; but self-absorp- 
tion is the edged tool that maims a wavering hand. 
His will, in the primary sense, was weak from the be- 
ginning. It became more and more reduced by those 
habits which, of all the defences of a noble mind, 
attack this stronghold first. It was not able to pre- 
serve for him the sanity of true genius, and his prod 
uct, therefore, was so much the less complete. 

" O well for him whose will is strong ! 
He suffers, but he will not suffer long," 

Foe suffered, in bitter truth, and the end came not 
through triumph, but in death. His fame is not what 
it might have been, we say j yet it is greater than he 



Secret of 
Poe''s dis- 
asters. 



No real 
stre7igth of 
will. 



272 



EDGAR ALLAN POE. 



Fatne 
waits on 
worth and 
work. 



— dying with a sense of incompleteness — probably 
expected it to be, and more than he could have asked. 
In spite, then, of the most reckless career, the work a 
man really accomplishes — both for what it is in it- 
self and for what it reveals of the author's gift — in 
the end will be valued exactly at its worth. Does the 
poet, the artist, demand some promise that it also may 
be made to tell during our working life, and even that 
life be lengthened till the world shall learn to honor 
it? Let him recall the grave, exalted words which 
Poe took at hazard for his " Ligeia," and stayed not 
to dwell upon their spiritual meaning : " Man doth 
not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, 
save only through the weakness of his own feeble 
will" 



CHAPTER VIII, 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 



A DISCUSSION of any art or artist readily enough 
might begin with a chapter on Fashion. Of this 
I ask no Uvelier illustration than the experience of a 
poet whose time-honored method is just now fresh in 
favor, as if he were at matins instead of even-song. 
It is somewhat strange that the Greeks — at least 
those late Athenians who spent their time in nothing 
else but either to tell or to hear some new thing — 
should have left vacant the seat in their hemicycle to 
which their gay inheritors have directed that puissant 
goddess, La Mode. The dullest know that to her are 
sacred, as the school-books say, not only dress and 
manners, .but st3''les of furniture, decoration, and all 
that caters to the lust of the eye and the pride of life. 
But the adept perceive that fashion often decides our 
taste in literature, our bent of study, and even of re- 
ligious thought ; how much it has to do with the spirit, 
no less than the outcome, of human effort. Progress 
comes by experiment, and this from ennui — ennui 
that leads to voyages, wars, revolutions, and plainly to 
change in the arts of expression ; that cries out to the 
imagination, and is the nurse of the invention whereof 
we term necessity the mother. The best of modes is 
not above challenge. No stroke can always hold the 
trophy. Pretty much the same instinct that makes a 
18 



Fashion^ 
or Vogtte^ 
in A rt. 
Cp. " Vic^ 
torian 
Poets " : 
/• 150- 



274 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 



Revival of 
old time 
modes. 



woman accept the later, perhaps the uglier, style of 
dress, secures a trial, even a vogue, to some new 
method in art or letters. Few demur longer than 
Taglioni's sister, who stared at a bonnet, the last new 
thing from Paris, then laughed outright and said, 
" How very ridiculous you look, my dean . . , Can 
you get me one like it ? " In fact, we must have dis- 
covery, and that by licensing the fashions of successive 
times, most of them defective, many retrogressive, a 
few on the path to higher use and beauty. These 
few may return again and again ; they go out of sight, 
but on an elliptic orbit. Contemporary judgment is 
least of all judicial. The young forestall novelty it- 
self. The old mistrust or look backward with a sense 
of loss. It is hard for either to apply tests that are 
above each fashion, yet derived from all. I suppose 
that in vicious, and in barren, periods of our English 
song, men's faculties were much the same as ever ; 
that a sense of beauty was on the alert. There is an 
exhortation to critical humility when some despised 
style of a past century suddenly appears fit and at- 
tractive ; when, from caprice or wholesome instinct, 
we pick up the round-bowed spectacles of our for- 
bears and see things as they saw them. Their art, 
dress, accent, quaintly rebuke us ; their dainty spirit 
lives again, and we adopt, as lightly as we formerly 
contemned, a fashion which we avow that at last we 
rightly interpret. 

It is wholly natural, then, that a poet like Dr. 
Holmes should have been in vogue and out of vogue ; 
one who easily can afford to regard either position 
with tranquillity, but at times, it may be, and solely 
as to his metrical theories, thought somewhat too an- 
tiquated by wits of the new dispensation. At this 
moment, — ■ the favorite both of Time, to whom thanks 



A POET OF THE OLD SCHOOL. 



275 



for touching him so gently, and of a tide that again 
bears him forward, — lie is warmly appreciated by 
verse-makers of the latest mode. As a scienlific hom- 
ilist, his popular gauge has been less subject to fluc- 
tuations. Science has but one fashion — to lose noth- 
ing once gained ; and Holmes's pluck and foresight 
kept him ahead till his neighbors caught up and jus- 
tified him. His verse, however, puts us on terms with 
a man of certain tastes and breeding; it is the result 
of qualities which may or may not be fashionable at 
a given date. Just now they connect him with the 
army of occupation, — a veteran, it is true, but, despite 
his ribbons and crosses, assuredly not " retired." 

The distinction between his poetry and that of the 
new makers of society-verse is that his is a survival, 
theirs the attempted revival, of something that has 
gone before. He wears the seal of " that past Geor- 
gian day " by direct inheritance, not from the old 
time in England, but from that time in England's let- 
tered colonies, whose inner sections still preserve the 
hereditary language and customs as they are scarcely 
to be found elsewhere. His work is as emblematic of 
the past as are the stairways and hand-carvings in 
various houses of Cambridge, Portsmouth, and Nor- 
wich. Some of our modern verse is a symptom of 
the present renaissance, — which itself delights in 
going beyond its models. More spindles, more arti- 
fice, more furbelows and elaborate graces. Its origi- 
nals were an imitation, as w'e find them in the villas 
of Pope and Walpole, in Hogarth's toilet-party, in ar- 
chitecture, gardening, costume, furniture, manners. 
Here were negro pages, gewgaws, silks and porcelain 
from China (as now from Japan) — a mixture of Brit- 
ish, Gallic, and Oriental fashions and decorations. 
Now we are working in much the same spirit, and 



Holmes'' s 
method a 
survival,, 
atid 7wt a 
rcnais- 
sa?ice. 



TJie 7iew 
vogne. 



276 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 



Holmes^ 

the leader 
of his 
class. 



A Iways a 
University 



even more resolutely, with novelties added from re- 
gions then unfamiliar, but reviving in both life and 
literature the manner of that day. A new liking for 
the Georgian heroics and octosyllabics is queerly 
blended with our practice in the latest French forms, 
— themselves a revival of a far more ancient min- 
strelsy. Such things when first produced, the genuine 
expression of their time, may yield a less conscious 
pleasure, but are of more worth ; they have the savor 
of honest purpose, which their imitation lacks. Among 
living old-style poets, Dr. Holmes, the least complex 
and various, seems most nearly to the manner born ; 
his work, as I say, being a survival, and not an ex- 
periment. It is freshened, however, by the animation 
which, haplessly for compilers of provincial literature, 
was wanting in the good Old Colony days. The 
maker wears the ancestral garb, and is a poet in 
spite of it. His verses have the courtesy and wit, 
without the pedagogy, of the knee-buckle time, and a 
flavor that is really their own. There are other 
eighteenth-century survivors, whose sponsors are for- 
mality and dulness ; but Holmes has the modern 
vivacity, and adjusts without effort even the most 
hackneyed measures to a new occasion. Throughout 
the changes of fifty years he has practised the method 
familiar to his youth, thinking it fit and natural, and 
one to which he would do well to cling. The con- 
servative persistency of his muse is as notable in mat- 
ter as in manner. On the whole, so far as we can 
classify him, he is at the head of his class, and in 
other respects a class by himself. 

Though the most direct and obvious of the Cam- 
bridge group, the least given to subtilties, he is our 
typical university poet ; the minstrel of the college that 
bred him, and within whose liberties he has taught, 



THE HARVARD WIT AXD LAUREATE. 



277 



jested, sung, and toasted, from boyhood to what in 
common folk would be old age. Alma Mater has 
been more to him than to Lowell or Longfellow, — 
has occupied a surprising portion of his range ; if we 
go back to Frere and Canning, even to Gray, for 
his like, there is no real prototype, and yet, as a uni- 
versity poet, he curiously illustrates his own theories 
of natural descent. Behind him figure many Harvard 
rhymesters, — scholars and divines, \vho, like the War- 
tons at Oxford, wrote verse whether poets or not, Eng- 
lish and Latin 7itcllo discri??ime^ and few indeed were 
our early verse-makers that were not college men. 
Holmes would be Holmes, if Norton and Urian 
Oakes, — to say nothing of their Tenth Muse, Mistress 
Bradstreet, whose Augustan features, if some Smybert 
only had preserved them for us, assuredly should dis- 
tinguish the entrance to the Harvard Annex, — if these 
worthies, even if Byles and Green, had not flourished 
before him ; but he is the lawful heir to their fervor, 
wit, and authority, and not until he came into his estate 
could Harvard boast a natural songster as her laureate. 
Two centuries of acclimation, and some experience of 
liberty, probably were needed to germinate the fancy 
that riots in his measures. Before his day, moreover, 
the sons of the Puritans hardly were ripe for the doc- 
trine that there is a time to laugh, that humor is quite 
as helpful a constituent of life as gravity or gloom. 
Provincial-wise, they at first had to receive this in its 
cruder form, and relished heartily the broad fun of 
Holmes's youthful verse. Their mirth - maker soon 
perceived that both fun and feeling are heightened 
when combined. As a wit, no writer of English, unless 
it be Lowell, at this day vies with him. As a humorist, 
the poet of " The Last Leaf " was among the first to 
teach his countrymen that pathos is an equal part of 
12 



Disperser 
of the an- 
cestral 
gloom. 



278 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 



Oliver 
Wendell 
Hohttes : 
born in 
Cam- 
bridge^ 
Mass., 
Aug. 29, 



At Har- 
vard, 
1825-29. 



hight of 
hearty and 
fidl of 
health and 
zest. 



true humor -, that sorrow is lightened by jest, and jest 
redeemed from coarseness by emotion, under most con- 
ditions of this our evanescent human life. 



II. 

What one does easily is apt to be his forte, though 
years may pass before he finds this out. Holmes's 
early pieces, mostly college-verse, were better of their 
kind than those of a better kind written in youth by 
some of his contemporaries. The humbler the type, 
the sooner the development. The young poet had 
the aid of a suitable habitat ; life at Harvard was 
the precise thing to bring out his talent. There was 
nothing of the hermit-thrush in him ; his temper was 
not of the withdrawing and reflective kind, nor mood- 
ily introspective, — it throve on fellowship, and he 
looked to his mates for an audience as readily as they 
to him for a toast-master. He seems to have escaped 
the poetic measles altogether ; if not, he hid his dis- 
order with rare good sense, for his verse nowhere 
shows that he felt himself " among men, but not of 
them " ; on the contrary, he fairly might plume himself 
on reversing the Childe's boast, and declare " I have 
loved the world, and the world me." The thing we 
first note is his elastic, buoyant nature, displayed from 
youth to age with cheery frankness, — so that we in- 
stinctively search through his Dutch and Puritan an- 
cestries to see where came in the strain that made this 
Yankee Frenchman of so likable a type. Health be- 
gets relish, and Holmes has never lacked for zest, — 
zest that gives one the sensations best worth living for, 
if happiness be the true aim of life. He relished from 
the first, as keenly as an actor or orator or a clever 
woman, appreciation within sight and sound. There is 



MEDICAL MEN OF LETTERS. 



279 



an unwritten Plaudite at the end of every poem, al- 
most of every stanza. He has taken his reward as he 
went along, even before printing his songs ; and if he 
should fail of the birds in the bush, certainly has held 
to every one in hand. It is given to few^ to capture 
both the present and the future, — to Holmes, perhaps, 
more nearly than to most of his craft, yet he would 
be the last to doubt that he stands on low^er ground 
than those to whom poetry, for its own sake, has been 
a passion and belief. In his early work the mirth so 
often outweighed the sentiment as to lessen the prom- 
ise and the self-prediction of his being a poet indeed. 
Some of one's heart-blood must spill for this, and, 
while many of his youthful stanzas are serious and 
eloquent, those which approach the feeling of true 
poetry are in celebration of companionship and good 
cheer, so that he seems- like a down-East Omar or 
Hafiz, exemplifying what our gracious Emerson was 
wont to preach, that there is honest wisdom in song 
and joy. 

If the Rev. Abiel Holmes had serious thoughts of 
finding his boy so animated by the father's " Life of Dr. 
Stiles " as to be set upon entering the ministry, they 
must have faded out as he read the graceless rhymes, 
the comic and satiric verse, which the vivacious youth 
furnished to " The Collegian." His metrical escapades 
also boded ill, as in Lowell's case, for a long allegiance 
to the law, — which, it seems, he read after graduation. 
No one can long remain a good lawyer and a fertile 
man of letters. The medical profession, however, has 
teemed with poets and scholars ; for its practice makes 
literary effort a delightful change, an avocation, rather 
than a fatiguing addition to scriptural labor for daily 
bread. Dr. Samuel Latham Mitchill, for instance, fifty 
years ago in New York, was almost the prototype, 



''The Col- 
1S30. 



Medical 
men of 
letters. 



28o 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 



Qualities 

of 

Holmes's 

early 

verse. 



Rhetoric. 



mutatis mutandis, of our Autocrat, by virtue of his wit, 
learning, literary work, and civic and social impor- 
tance. Holmes is a shining instance of one who has 
done solid work as a teacher and practitioner, in spite 
of his success in literature. As a versifier, he started 
with the advantage of hitting the public by buffo- 
pieces, and with the disadvantage of being expected 
to make his after-hits in the same manner, — to write 
for popular amusement in the major rather than the 
minor key. His verses, with the measured drum-beat 
of their natural rhythm, were easily understood ; he 
bothered his audience with no accidental effects, no 
philandering after the finer lyrical distinctions. It is 
not hard to surmise what " standard " poets had been 
found on his father's book-shelves. Eloquence was a 
feature of his lyrics, — such as broke out in the line, 
" Ay, tear her tattered ensign down ! " and the simple 
force of " Old Ironsides " is indeed worth noting as it 
culminates in the last stanza. The making of verse 
that is seized upon by school-day spokesmen barely 
outlived the influence of Croly, of Drake and Halleck, 
of Pierpont with his " Stand ! the ground 's your own, 
my braves ! " and Holmes himself would scarcely write 
in this way now. Yet one who sees, looming up by 
the Portsmouth docks, a fine old hulk to which these 
lines secured half a century of preservation will find 
them coming again to mind. "The Meeting of the 
Dryads," another early poem, is marked by so much 
grace that it seems as if the youth who wrote its qua- 
trains might in time have added a companion-piece to 
" The Talking Oak." The things which he turned off 
with purely comic aim were neatly finished, and the 
merriment of a new writer, who dared not be "as 
funny " as he could, did quite as much for him as his 
poems of a higher class. The fashion of the latter, 



PERSONAL TRAITS. 



281 



however, we see returning again. There is the pathetic 
silhouette of the old man, who so 

"shakes his feeble head, 
That it seems as if he said, 
* They are gone.' " 

This equals the best recent knee-buckle verse, and 
excels most of it in simiDlicity. It taught a lesson to 
Locker and Saxe, and more than one among younger 
favorites look up to Holmes affectionately, conscious 
that the author of " The Last Leaf," " My Aunt," 
"The Dilemma," and of later trifles still more refined, 
like " Dorothy Q.," is the Nestor of their light-armed 
holiday encampment. 

A poet so full of zest is wont to live his life, rather 
than to scorn delights in service of the thankless 
muse. Dr. Holmes's easy-going method, and a sensi- 
ble estimate of his own powers, have defined the limits 
of his zeal. His poetry was and is, like his humor, the 
overflow of a nervous, original, decidedly intellectual 
nature ; of sparkling life, no less, in which he gath- 
ered the full worth of heyday experiences. See that 
glimpse of Paris, a student's pencilled sketch, with 
Clemence tripping down the Rue de Seine. It is but a 
bit, yet through its atmosphere we make out a poet who 
cared as much for the sweets of the poetic life as for 
the work that was its product. He had through it all 
a Puritan sense of duty, and the worldly wisdom that 
goes with a due perception of values, and he never lost 
sight of his practical career. His profession, after all, 
was what he took most seriously. Accepting, then, 
with hearty thanks, his care-dispelling rhyme and rea- 
son, pleased often by the fancies which he tenders in 
lieu of imagination and power, — we go through the 
collection of his verse, and see that it has amounted 
to a great deal in the course of a bustling fifty years. 



Knee- 
buckle 
verse. 



Personal 

character* 

istics. 



282 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 



These numerous pieces divide themselves, as to form, 
into two classes, — lyrics and poetic essays in solid 
couplet-verse ; as to purpose, into the lighter songs that 
may be sung, and the nobler numbers, part lyrical, part 
the poems, both gay and sober, delivered at frequent 
intervals during his pleasant career. He is a song- 
writer of the natural kind, through his taste for the 
open vowel-sounds, and for measures that set them- 
selves to tune. Lyrics of high grade, whose verbal 
and rhythmical design is of itself sufficient for the 
spiritual ear, are not those which are best adapted to 
the musician's needs. Some of Holmes's ballads are 
still better than his songs. Lines in "The Pilgrim's 
Vision " have a native flavor : — 



A natural 
songster 
andbal- 
ladist. 



" Come hither, God-be-Glorified, 

And sit upon my knee ; 
Behold the dream unfolding 

Whereof I spake to thee, 
By the winter's hearth in Leyden, 

And on the stormy sea." 

Even his ballads are raciest when brimmed with 
the element that most attracts their author, that of 
festive good-fellowship. He gives us a brave picture 
of Miles Standish, the lit'tle captain, stirring a posset 
with his sword : — 

" He poured the fiery Hollands in, — the man that never 

feared, — 
He took a long and solemn draught, and wiped his yellow 

beard ; 
And one by one the musketeers — the men that fought and 

prayed — 
All drank as 't were their mother's milk, and not a man 

afraid." 

Yet if the poet's artistic conscience had been sterner, 
the last tw^o stanzas of this ballad "On Lending a 



RHYMED ADDRESSES. 



28 



Punch-bowl " would not have been spared to weaken 
its proper close. 

In his favorite department Holmes always has been 
an easy winner, gaining in quality as fast as the stand- 
ard of such work has advanced. In fact, he has ad- 
vanced the standard by his own grow^th in brain- 
power and wisdom. There was a time when half 
our public men wrote poems for recitation, — when 
every set oration was paired with a platform-poem. 
The Phi Beta Kappa Society was answerable for many 
labored pentameters of Everett, Winthrop, Sprague, 
and other versifiers, born or made, — equally so the 
numberless corporations of the federative Saxon race 
in our aspiring municipalities. Of all these orators 
in rhyme, Holmes, by natural selection, survives to 
our day, — and how aptly he flourishes withal! From 
his start as class-poet, and his step to the front with 
Poetry^ a Metrical Essay, the intervals have not been 
long between his rhymed addresses of the standard 
platform length: at first named, like the books of 
Herodotus, after the Muses, — Ura?iia, Terpsichore, 
and so on, — a practice shrewdly abandoned, see- 
ing that the Graces, the Fates, and all the daugh- 
ters of Nereus hardly would suffice to christen the 
long succession of the Doctor's metrical disquisitions, 
greater or less, that ceases not even with our day. 
In the years that followed his graduation, while prac- 
tising in Boston and afterward a lecturer at Dartmouth, 
he was summoned, nothing loath, whenever a dinner- 
song or witty ballad was needed at home, and calls 
from transpontine and barbaric regions came fast 
upon him as his popularity grew. Here are some 
forty printed poems, which cheered that lucky class 
of '29, and how many others went before and after 
them w^e know not. Among college-poets the para- 



His 

rhymed 
A ddresses. 



" Poetry : 
a Metrical 
Essay, ''^ 



" Poems oj 
tJie Class 

0/^29^ 

1851-81. 



284 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 



Boston^ 

and its 
foet. 



Society 
Verse. 
See Chap. 
XII.., and 
cp. " Vic- 
torian 
Poets'": 
fp. 272, 
273" 



gon, — and surely this the ideal civic bard, who a* 
the outset boasted of his town, 

" Her threefold hill shall be 
The home of art, the nurse of liberty," 

and who has celebrated her every effort, in peace or 
war, to make good the boast. He is an essential part 
of Boston, like the crier who becomes so identified 
with a court that it seems as if Justice must change 
her quarters when he is gone. The Boston of Holmes, 
distinct as his own personality, certainly must go with 
him. Much will become new, when old things pass 
away with the generation of a wit who made a jest 
that his State House was the hub of the solar system, 
and in his heart believed it. The time is ended when 
we can be so local ; this civic faith was born before 
the age of steam, and cannot outlast, save as a tradi- 
tion, the advent of electric motors and octuple-sheets. 
Towns must lose their individuality, even as men, — 
who yearly differ less from one another. Yet the 
provincialism of Boston has been its charm, and its 
citizens, striving to be cosmopolitan, in time may re- 
pent the effacement of their birth-mark. 

I have referred to the standing of Dr. Holmes as 
a life-long expert in the art of writing those natty 
lyrics, satires, and jeux d'esprit, which it has become 
the usage to designate as society-verse. Ten years 
ago, when discussing this "patrician" industry, I 
scarcely foresaw how actively it soon would be pur- 
sued. Its minor devotees certainly have a place in 
the Parnassian court ; but, if content with this petted 
service, must rank among the squires and pages, and 
not as lords of high degree. To indulge in a conceit, 
— and no change of metaphor is too fanciful with xq> 
spect to the poetry of conceits and graces, — much 



SOCIETY-VERSE. 



285 



of our modish verse is only the soufflce and syllabub 
of a banquet from which strength-giving meats and 
blooded wine are absent. Taken as the verse which 
a drawling society affects to patronize, it figures even 
with the olives and radishes scattered along the meal, 
wherefrom arrogance and beauty languidly pick trifles 
while their thoughts are on something else, — or with 
the comfits at the end, lipped and fingered by sated 
guests, or taken home as a souvenir and for the 
nursery. And yet society-verse, meaning that which 
catches the secret of that day or this, may be — as 
poets old and new have shown us — picturesque, even 
dramatic, and rise to a high degree of humor and of 
sage or tender thought. The consecutive poems of 
one w'hose fancy plays about life as he sees it may 
be a feast complete and epicurean, having solid dishes 
and fantastic, all justly savored, cooked with discre- 
tion, flanked w'ith honest wine, and whose cates and 
dainties, even, are not designed to cloy. Taken as a 
whole, Holmes's poetry has regaled us somewhat after 
this fashion. His pieces light and wise — " Content- 
ment," the " Epilogue to the Breakfast-table Series," 
" At the Pantomime," " A Familiar Letter," etc. — 
are always enjoyable. One or two are exquisite in 
treatment of the past. "Dorothy Q.," that sprightly 
capture of a portrait's maiden soul, has given, like 
" The Last Leaf," lessons to admiring pupils of our 
time. For sheer humor, " The One-hoss Shay " and 
" Parson Turell's Legacy " are memorable, — extrav- 
agances, but full of character, almost as purely Yan- 
kee as " Tam O'Shanter " is purely Scotch. In va- 
rious whimsicalities, Holmes sets the key for Harte 
and others to follow. " The First Fan," read at a 
bric-a-brac festival in 1877, proves him an adept in 
the latest mode. There is also a conceit of showing 



Holmes tJtz 
true A ni- 
^hitryon. 



286 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 



His inost 

ideal 

poems. 



Cp. " El- 
egy on a 
Shell— 
The Nau- 
tilus'''': 
Duyck. 
"•Cyc.Am. 
Lit:' /., 
537- 



the youngsters a trick or two, in the story " How the 
Old Horse Won the Bet," told to the class of '71 by 
the minstrel of the class of '29, and pointed with the 
moral that "A horse can trot, for all he's old." 

Good and bright as these things are, some of his 
graver work excels them. Where most in earnest he 
is most imaginative ; this, of course, is where he is 
most interested, and this again, in moods the results 
of his scientific bent and experience. Here he shows 
himself akin to those who have both lightness and 
strength. Thackeray's reverential mood, that was so 
beautiful, is matched by the feeling which Holmes, 
having the familiarity with nature that breeds contempt 
in grosser men, exhibits in his thoughts upon " The 
Living Temple." The stanzas thus named, in meas- 
ure and reverent effect, are not unworthy to be read 
with Addison's lofty paraphrase of the Nineteenth 
Psalm. Humility in presence of recognized law is 
the spirit of the flings at cant and half-truth in his 
rhymed essays. There are charity and tenderness in 
"The Voiceless," "Avis," "Iris," and "The Silent Mel- 
ody." Another little poem, "Under the Violets," re- 
veals the lover of Collins. But " The Living Temple " 
and " The Chambered Nautilus " doubtless show us 
their writer's finest qualities, and are not soon to be 
forgotten. There is a group of his "Vignettes," in 
recollection of Wordsworth, Moore, Keats, and Shelley, 
whose cadence is due to that gift of sympathetic vi- 
bration which poets seem to possess. These pieces 
are as good as any to furnish examples of the sudden 
fancies peculiar to Holmes's genius, whose glint, if not 
imagination, is like that of the sparks struck off from 
it. One from the stanzas on Wordsworth : — 

"This is my bark, — a pigmy's ship; 
Beneath a child it rolls ; 



SPARKLLYG 'OCCASIOXAL' PIECES. 



287 



Fear not, — one body makes it dip, 
But not a thousand souls." 

And this from the Shelley poem, which has an elo- 
quent movement throughout : — 

" But Love still prayed, with agonizing wail, 

' One, one last look, ye heaving waters, yield ! ' 
Till Ocean, clashing in his jointed mail. 

Raised the pale burden on his level shield." 

The things which, after all, sharply distinguish 
Holmes from other poets, and constitute the bulk of 
his work, are the lyrics and metrical essa3^s composed 
for special audiences or occasions. Starting without 
much creative ambition, and as a bard of mirth and 
sentiment, it is plain that he was subject to faults 
which an easy standard entails. His aptitude for 
writing, wdth entire correctness, in familiar measures, 
has been such that nothing but an equal mental apt- 
ness could make up for the frequent padding, the in- 
evitably thin passages, of his longer efforts, and for 
the conceits to which, like Moore and Hood, he has 
been tempted to sacrifice the spirit of many a grace- 
ful poem. To this day there is no telling whither a 
fancy, once caught and mounted, will bear this lively 
rider. Poetry at times has seemed his diversion, 
rather than a high endeavor ; yet perhaps this very 
seeming is essential to the frolic and careless temper 
of society-verse. The charm that is instant, the tri- 
umph of the passing hour, — these are captured by 
song that often is transitory as the night which listens 
to it. In Holmes we have an attractive voice devoted 
to a secondary order of expression. Yet many of his 
notes survive, and are worthy of a rehearing. A true 
faculty is requisite to insure this result, and it is but 
just to say that with his own growth his brilliant oc- 
casional pieces strengthened in thought, wit, and feeling. 



Faults a7id 
merits of , 
the "occa^ 
szo?iat" 
verse. 



288 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, 



Eighteenth 
Century 
style and 
thought. 



With respect to his style, there is no one more free 
from structural whims and vagaries. He has an ear 
for the " classical " forms of English verse, the aca- 
demic measures which still bid fair to hold their own 
— ■ those confirmed by Pope and Goldsmith, and here 
in vogue long after German dreams, Italian languors, 
and the French rataplan had their effect upon the 
poets of our motherland across the sea. His way of 
thought, like his style, is straightforward and senten- 
tious ; both are the reverse of what is called transcen- 
dental. When he has sustained work to do, and 
braces himself for a great occasion, nothing will suit 
but the rhymed pentameter ; his heaviest roadster, six- 
teen hands high, for a long journey. It has served 
him well, is his by use and possession, and he stur- 
dily will trust it to the end : — ■ 

" Friends of the Muse, to you of right belong 
The first staid footsteps of my square-toed song; 
Full well I know the strong heroic line 
Has lost its fashion since I made it mine ; 
But there are tricks old singers will not learn, 
And this grave measure still must serve my turn. 

Nor let the rhymester of the hour deride 

The straight-backed measure with its stately stride i 

It gave the mighty voice of Dryden scope ; 

It sheathed the steel-bright epigrams of Pope ; 

In Goldsmith's verse it learned a sweeter strain; 

Byron and Campbell wore its clanking chain ; 

I smile to listen while the critic's scorn 

Flouts the proud purple kings have nobly worn ; 

Bid each new rhymer try his dainty skill 

And mould his frozen phrases as he will ; 

We thank the artist for his neat device, — 

The shape is pleasing, though the stuff is ice." 

He compares it, as contrasted with later modes, to 



HIS FAVORITE MEASURE. 



289 



"the slashed doublet of the cavalier," — the costume 
that would be chosen by Velasquez or Van Dyke. 
Now, the heroic measure is stately, but if picturesque- 
ness is to be the test, few will back his opinion that 
in this measure, as written by Pope's adherents, " Un- 
fading still the better type endures." In the course 
of English song, the rhymed pentameter has included 
more distinct styles than even blank-verse, and quite 
as plainly takes on the stamp of its moulder. For the 
man, after all, makes or mars it ; it lends itself with 
fatal readiness to merely didactic uses, and hence has 
been the patient slave of dullards. As written by 
Chaucer, it was picturesque, full of music and color, 
— the interfluent, luxurious pentameter couplet, re- 
vived by Hunt and Keats, and variously utilized for 
metrical narrative by successive nineteenth-century 
poets. Still, the " straight-backed," heroic measure 
of Queen Anne's time, say what we will, must be a 
natural and generic English form, that could so main- 
tain itself to our own day. Recall Pope's measure in 
"The Dunciad," and again, in "The Rape of the 
Lock," — that elegant mock-epic which yet stands at 
the head of all poetry a-la-mode. How it delights a 
class that still read Byron and Campbell and Scott, 
the learned body of jurists and other professional 
men, sensible and humane, who care little for the 
poetry of beauty alone. I observe that lawyers, vet- 
eran judges, merry and discreet, enjoy the verse of 
Holmes. It was asked concerning Landor, " Shall 
not the wise have their poets as well as the witless .'' " 
and shall we begrudge the wigged and gowned their 
rations of wit and epigram and lettered jest ? Not 
the form, but the informing spirit, is the essential 
thing, and this many, who are on the watch for Amer- 
ican originality, fail to comprehend. An apt taster 
19 



The 

rhytncd 
pentame- 
ter. 



See p. 89. 



Sc7iten- 
iiousfiess. 



290 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 



Master of 
his own 
Jield. 



A distinc- 
tive gift. 



knows which wine has the novel flavor, though the 
vintages look alike to the eyes. 

The mechanism of Holmes's briefer occasional 
poems is fully as trite and simple. Whether this 
may be from choice or limitation, he has accumu- 
lated a unique series of pieces, vivacious as those of 
Tom Moore, but with the brain of New England in 
them, and notions and instances without end. How 
sure their author's sense of the fitness of things, his 
gift of adaptability to the occasion, — to how many 
occasions, and what different things ! He outrivals 
Kossuth, the adroit orator who landed in a new world, 
master of its language, and had forensic arguments 
for the bar, grace and poetry for women, statistics for 
merchants, and an assortment of local allusions for 
the respective towns and villages in which he pleaded 
his cause. A phantasmagory of the songs, odes, and 
rhymed addresses, of so many years ; collegiate and 
civic glories ; tributes to princes, embassies, generals, 
heroes ; welcomes to novelists and poets ; eulogies of 
the dead ; verse inaugural and dedicatory ; stanzas 
read at literary breakfasts, New England dinners, 
municipal and bucolic feasts ; odes natal, nuptial, and 
mortuary ; metrical delectations offered to his brothers 
of the medical craft — to which he is so loyal — brist- 
ling with scorn of quackery and challenge to oppos- 
ing systems, — not only equal to all occasions, but 
growing better with their increase. The half of his 
early collections is made up from efforts of this sort, 
and they constitute four fifths of his verse during 
the last thirty years. Now, what has carried Holmes 
so bravely through all this, if not a kind of special 
masterhood, an individuality, humor, touch, that we 
shall not see again ? Thus we come, in fine, to be 
sensible of the distinctive gift of this poet. The 



PROSE WRITINGS. 



291 



achievement for which he must be noted is, that in a 
field the most arduous and least attractive he should 
bear himself with such zest and fitness as to be num- 
bered among poets, and should do honor to an office 
which they chiefly dread or mistrust, and which is little 
calculated to excite their inspiration. 

III. 

Having in mind the case of our Autocrat, one is 
moved to traverse the ancient maxim, and exclaim, 
"Count no man unhappy till his dying day." There 
are few instances where a writer, suddenly, and after 
the age when fame is won " or never," compels the 
public to readjust its estimate of his powers. Holmes 
was not idle as a rhymester from 1836 to 1857 ; but 
his chief labor was given to medical practice and in- 
struction, and it Avas fair to suppose that his literary 
capacity had been gauged. Possibly his near friends 
had no just idea of his versatile talent until he put 
forth the most taking serial in prose that ever estab- 
lished the prestige of a new magazine. At forty-eight 
he began a new career, as if it were granted him to 
live life over, with the wisdom of middle-age in his 
favor at the start. Coming, in a sense, like an author's 
first book, The Autocrat of the Breakfast- Table natu- 
rally was twice as clever as any " first book " of the 
period. It appears that this w^ork was planned in his 
youth ; but we owe to his maturity the experience, 
drollery, proverbial humor, and suggestion that flow 
at ease through its pages. Little is too high or too 
low for the comment of this down-East philosopher. 
A kind of attenuated Franklin, he views things and 
folks with the less robustness, but with keener dis- 
tinction and insight. His pertinent maxims are so 



His works 
ill prose. 



" TJie Au- 
tocrat of 
tlie Break- 
fast-Ta- 
ble,'" 1858. 



292 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 



The '■'■Au- 
tocrat " 
Series. 



frequent that it seems, as was said of Emerson, as if 
he had jotted them down from time to time and here 
first brought them to appHcation ; they are apothegms 
of common life and action, often of mental experience, 
strung together by a device so original as to make 
the work quite a novelty in literature. The Autocrat 
holds an intellectual tourney at a boarding-house table ; 
there jousts against humbug and stupidity, gives light 
touches of knowledge, sentiment, illustration, coins 
here and there a phrase destined to be long current, 
nor forgets the poetic duty of providing a little idyl 
of human love and interest. Here, also, we find his 
best lyrical pieces, — on the side of beauty, " The 
Chambered Nautilus " and " The Living Temple " ; 
on that of mirth, " The One-Hoss Shay " and its com- 
panion-piece. How alert his fancy ! A tree blows 
down in his woods ; he counts the rings — there are 
hundreds of them. *' This is Shakespeare's. The 
tree was seven inches in diameter when he was born, 
ten inches when he died. A little less than ten inches 
when Milton was born ; seventeen when he died. . . . 
Here is the span of Napoleon's career. ... I have 
seen many wooden preachers, never one like this." 
Again, of letters from callow aspirants : " I have two 
letters on file ; one is a pattern of adulation, the other 
of impertinence. My reply to the first, containing the 
best advice I could give, conveyed in courteous lan- 
guage, had brought out the second. There was some 
sport in this, but Dullness is not commonly a game 
fish, and only sulks after he is struck." In fine, the 
Autocrat, if not profound, is always acute, — the live- 
liest of monologists, and altogether too game to be 
taken at a disadvantage within his own territory. 

Two later books, completing the Autocrat series, 
follow in a similar vein, their scene the same board 



THE 'AUTOCRAT' SERIES. 



29. 



ing-house, their slight plots varied by new personages 
and by-play, the eonductor of the \'ankee symposia 
the same Autocrat, through the aid of a Professor and 
a Poet successively. The best comment on these 
works is made by their sagacious author, who likens 
them to the wine of grapes that are squeezed in the 
press after the first juice that runs of itself from the 
heart of the fruit has been drawn off. In this lies a 
recognition of the effect of a market that comes to an 
author somewhat late in his life. It is too much to 
expect that one who makes a wonderfully fresh start 
at fifty should run better and better, as if in the pro- 
gressive and not the decadent course of life, which 
latter our author himself reckons from a much earlier 
stage. And a paying American market for purely lit- 
erary work began with the foundation of the "Atlan- 
tic." Poe's will had been too weak to wait for it ; 
Hawthorne had striven for years ; others had struggled 
and gone down. A lucrative demand for Holmes's 
prose was too grateful not to be utilized ; besides, 
the income of the magazine required his efforts. I 
have laid stress upon the need of a market to promote 
literary activity, but it is worth while to note how far, 
at certain times and in special cases, too ready a sale 
tends to lower the grade of ideal work. This may 
even now be observed. On the one hand, new writers 
certainly are brought out by the competition between 
our thriving publishers of books and periodicals ; on 
the other, those who prove themselves capable, and are 
found available by the caterers, are drawn into a sys- 
tem of over-methodical production at stated intervals. 
The stint is furnished regularly; each year or half- 
year the new novel is thrown off. cleverly adapted to 
the popular taste. Ideal effort is deadened ; the nat- 
ural bent of a poetic mind is subordinated to labor 



Danglers 
of a sure 
market. 



294 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 



" The Pro- 
fessor at 
the Break- 
fast- Ta- 
ble;' 1859. 



" The Poet 
at the 
Breakfast- 
Table,"" 
1873. 



" Elsie 

Venner^'' 

i86i. 



" The 
Guardian 
Angel,'' 
1867. 



that is best paid. The hope, patience, aspiration that 
should produce a masterpiece are cast aside. If there 
be a general advance it is monotonous, and at the 
expense of individual genius. My deduction is that 
matter supplied regularly for a persistent market, 
though of a high order of journey-work, is not im- 
properly designated by that name. 

The Professor is written somewhat in the manner 
of Sterne, yet without much artifice. The story of 
Iris is an interwoven thread of gold. The poems in 
this book are inferior to those of the Autocrat, but 
its author here and there shows a gift • of drawing 
real characters ; the episode of the Little Gentleman 
is itself a poem, — its close very touching, though im- 
itated from the death-scene in Tristram Shandy. The 
Poet at the Breakfast- Table ^ written some years after, is 
of a more serious cast than its predecessors, chiefly 
devoted to Holmes's peculiar mental speculations and 
his fluent gossip on books and learning. He makes 
his rare old pundit a liberal thinker, clearly of the 
notion that a high scholarship leads to broader views. 
I do not think he would banish Greek from a college 
curriculum ; but if he should, the Old Master would 
cry out upon him. Between the second and third 
works of this series, his two novels had appeared, -^ 
curious examples of what a clever observer can do 
by way of fiction in the afternoon of life. As con- 
ceptions, these were definite and original, as much so 
as Hawthorne's ; but that great romancer would have 
presented in a far more dramatic and imaginative 
fashion an Elsie Venner, tainted with the ophidian 
madness that so vexed her human soul, — a Myrtle 
Hazard, inheriting the trace of Indian savagery at 
war with her higher organization. The somewhat 
crude handling of these tales betrays the fact that 



AA^ INDEPENDENT THINKER. 



295 



the author was not trained by practice in the nove- 
list's art. But they have the merit of coniing- down 
to fact ^vilh :in cxliil)ition of conunon, often vulgar, 
everv-da\- life in I he countr\- towns of Massachusetts. 
This, and realistic drawings of sundry provincial types, 
Holmes produces in a manner directly on the way to 
the subsequent evolution of more finished works, like 
Howells's "A Modern Instance" and "The Undis- 
covered Country." Meanwhile he verifies his birth- 
right by adapting these narratives to the debate on 
inherited tendency, limited responsibility, and freedom 
of the will. On the whole, the novels and the Auto- 
crat volumes were indigenous works, in plot and style 
behind the deft creations of our day, but with their 
writer's acumen everywhere conspicuous. If their sci- 
ence and su2:2:estion now seem trite, it must be 
owmed that the case was opposite when they were 
writLen, and that ideas now familiar were set afloat in 
this way. Little of our recent literature is so fresh, 
relatively to our period, as these books were in con- 
sideration of their own. As Holmes's humor had re- 
laxed the grimness of a Puritan constituency, so his 
prose satire did much to liberalize their clerical sys- 
tem. This was not without some wrath and objurga- 
tion on the part of the more rigid clergy and laity 
alike, and at times worked to the disadvantage of the 
satirist and his publishers. The situation now seems 
far away and amusing : equally so, the queer audac- 
ity of his off-hand pronunciamentos upon the gravest 
themes. He was responsible, I fear, for a very airy 
settlement of distracting social problems, to -his own 
satisfaction and that of a generation of half-informed 
readers ; for getting ready sanction to his postulate of 
a Brahmin caste, and leading many a Gifted Hopkins 
to set up for its representative. Yet his dialogues 



Realistic 
prototypes. 



A sliaking 
oftJie dry 
bo7ies. 



296 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 



flolmes's 
later work. 



A ddress 
071 Emer- 
son {Mass. 
Hist. 
Soc), 1882. 



and stories are in every way the expression of a stim- 
ulating personage, their author, — a frank display of 
the Autocrat himself. If one would learn how to be 
his own Boswell, these five books are naive examples 
of a successful American method. 

Holmes's mental fibre, sturdier with use, shows to 
advantage in a few poems, speeches, and prose essays 
of his later years. These illustrate the benefits to an 
author of having, in Quaker diction, a concern upon 
him; each, like the speech "On the Inevitable Crisis," 
is the outflow of personal conviction, or, like " Ho- 
meopathy vs. Allopathy," "The Physiology of Versifi- 
cation," etc., the discussion of a topic in which he 
takes a special interest. Jonathan Edwards he had 
epitomized in verse : — ■ 

" the salamander of divines. 
A deep, strong nature, pure and undefiled ; 
Faith, strong as his who stabbed his sleeping child." 

The notable prose essay on Edwards excites a wish 
that he oftener had found occasion to indulge his 
talent for analytic characterization. He has few su- 
periors in discernment of a man's individuality, how- 
ever distinct that individuality may be from his own. 
Emerson, for example, was a thinker and poet whose 
chartered disciples scarcely would have selected 
Holmes as likely to proffer a sympathetic or even ob- 
jective transcript of him. Yet, v/hen the time came, 
Holmes was equal to the effort. He presented with 
singular clearness, and with an epigrammatic genius 
at white heat, if not the esoteric view of "'^e Concord 
Plotinus, at least what could enable an audience to 
get at the mould of that serene teacher and make 
some fortunate surmise of the spirit that ennobled it. 
I do not recall a more faithful and graphic outside 
portrait. True, it was done by an artist who applies 



PIQUANT ORIGINALITY. 



297 



the actual eye, used for corporal vision, to the elusive 
side of things, and who thinks little too immaterial 
for the test of reason and science, — who looks, we 
might say, at unexplored tracts by sunlight rather 
than starlight. But it sets Emerson before us in both 
his noonday and sundown moods ; in his character as 
a town-dweller, and also as wdien "he looked ujDon 
this earth ver}Mnuch as a. visitor from another planet 
would look on it." With no waste words, the poet's 
walk, talk, bearing, and intellect are illustrated by a 
series of images, and in a style so vehicular as to de- 
serve unusual praise. Before the appearance of Dr. 
Holmes's full treatise on the theme, I read this Bos- 
ton address and suspected that in understanding of 
the Emersonian cult he was not behind its votaries. 
His acceptance of it may be another thing, depend- 
ing, like his religion, upon the cast of his own na- 
ture. 

Many were surprised to find Mr. Arnold rating 
Emerson, as a writer, below Montaigne. The latter, 
how^ever rare and various, depended largely in his 
essays on citations from the ancients, — in fact, from 
writers of every grade and period ; while of Emerson's 
infrequent borrowing it may be said that his para- 
phrase often is worth more than the original, and 
that otherwise each of his fruitful sentences contains 
some ejDigram, or striking thought, illuminated by a 
flash of insight and power. Holmes, among our 
poets, is another original WTiter, but his prose is a 
setting for brilliants of a different kind ; his shrewd 
sayings are bright with native metaphor ; he is a 
proverb-maker, some of whose words are not without 
wings. When he ranges along the line of his tastes 
and studies, w^e find him honestly bred. Plato and 
the Stagirite, the Elzevir classics, the English essay- 



Holmes, 
as an 
cpigrafn- 
matist and 
proverb- 
vtaker. 



298 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 



A believ- 
er in the 
Reign of 
Lain. 



Conserva- 
tism. 



\,oyaUy. 



ists, the fathers of the healing art, must be in sight 
on his shelves, even though 

" the damp offspring of the modern press 
Flaunts on his table with its pictured dress.'* 

But his proper study is man, the regard of . people 
and movements close at hand. Somewhat distrustful 
of the " inner light," he stands squarely upon obser- 
vation, experience, induction ; yet at times is so vol- 
atile a theorist that one asks how much of his saying 
is conviction, and how much mirth or whim. His 
profession has put him on the alert for natural ten- 
dency, in the belief that fortune goes by inheritance. 
Crime and virtue are physically foreordained. He 
takes unkindly to sentimental attempts at reform. 
His temper and training so largely affect his writings 
that the latter scarcely can be criticised from the 
merely literary point of view. Holmes's conservatism, 
then, goes well enough with a poet of the old regime, 
and with the maker of light satires and well-bred 
verse. In these the utterance of a radical would be 
as out of keeping as Brown of Osawatomie in a 
court-suit. There is no call for diatribes on his lack 
of sympathy with the Abolitionists, with the transcen- 
dentalists, with new schools of medicine and art. 
What has this to do with the service of our gallant 
and amiable chanteur ? He sticks to his own like the 
wearer of " The Entailed Hat." Innovation savors 
ill to his nostril ; yet we feel that if brought face to 
face with a case of wrong or suffering, his action 
would be prompted by a warm heart and as swift as 
any enthusiast could desire. When the Civil War 
broke out, this conservative poet, who had taken little 
part in the agitation that preceded it, shared in every 
way the spirit and duties of the time. None of oui 



A NCES TRA L FEELIXG. 



299 



poets wrote more stirring war lyrics during the con- 
flict, none has been more national so far as loyally, 
in the Websterian sense, to our country and her em- 
blems is concerned. He always has displayed the 
simple instinctive patriotism of the American minute- 
man. He may or may not side with his neighbors, 
but he is for the nation ; purely republican, if scarcely 
democratic. His pride is not of English, but of long 
American descent. The roundheads of the old coun- 
try were the cavaliers of the new, — a band of unti- 
tled worthies moving off to found clans of their own. 
" Other things being equal," the doctor does prefer 
"a man of family." He goes "for the man with a 
gallery of family portraits against the one with a 
twenty-five cent daguerreotype," unless he finds "that 
the latter is the better of the two." Better, he thinks, 
accept asphyxia than a mesalliance, that lasts fifty 
years to begin with, and then passes down the line 
of descent. Even our " chryso-aristocracy " he thinks 
is bettered by the process which secures to those 
" who can afford the extreme luxury of beauty " the 
finest specimens of " the young females of each suc- 
cessive season." Thus far our sacerdotal celebrant 
of genealogies and family-trees. It is likely that he 
takes more interest than his compeers in the Proc. 
Mass. Hist. Soc. But he represents his section within 
these limits as strictly as the poet of the library, the 
poet of the new and radical upper class, the fervent 
poet of liberty and exaltation, — or even as Emerson, 
that provincial citizen of the world at large. Our 
Eastern group of poets is unique ; we shall have no 
other of one caste and section so distinct in its sep- 
arate personages. The Puritan strain in Holmes's 
blood was kept pure in the secluded province of 
Connecticut, where the stern Calvinism of the migra- 



A trtie 

New-Efig' 

lander. 



300 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 



Pr. Coles. 



Holmes's 
personal 
ikarm and 



tion yet holds sway. Another beloved physician, Dr. 
Abraham Coles, — our best translator of the Latin 
Hymns, and the author of " The Microcosm," " The 
Evangel," and other poems and paraphrases in the 
same last-century verse that we have been consider- 
ing, — also is but a strayed inheritor, as his the- 
ology and pentameters unite in showing, of the colo- 
nial type. Dr. Holmes stands for the ancestral feeling 
as squarely as he refutes the old belief ; and it is 
well enough that such a poet should be the minstrel 
of established feasts, and loyal to his class, rather 
than the avatar of new classes and conditions. He 
is of Cambridge and Beacon Hill, and in point of 
style, usage, social life, will maintain his ground with 
rhyme and banter, — small swords allowed the Ru- 
perts of to-day. Otherwise he gives his judgment 
free scope, and no superstition trammels the logic of 
his inquisitive mind. It has required some indepen- 
dence for a man of letters, the friend of Lowell and 
Emerson, to be a Tory, and for a trimontane poet to 
be a progressive and speculative thinker. 

There is an unconscious sense of the artistic in the 
self-differentiation of social life. It organizes a stage 
performance ; each one makes himself auxiliary to the 
whole by some dramatic instinct that loyally accepts 
the part allotted. Holmes has filled that of hereditary 
chamberlain, the staff never leaving his hand, and has 
performed its functions with uncommon ardor and 
distinction. It would not be strange if those who 
often have seen at their ceremonies this " fellow of 
infinite jest, of most excellent fancy," appreciate less 
than others the strength of his ripest years. The 
younger men who gathered to pay him their tributes 
on his seventieth birthday felt that if he did not sing 
at his own fete his thought might well be : — 



' THE LAST reader: 



301 



— "You are kind ; may your tribe be increased, 
But at this I can give you such odds if I will ! " 

He did sing, and the mingled gayety and tender- 
ness of the song made it, as was fitting, one of his 
sweetest. The occasion itself mellowed his voice, and 
a mere fancy has not often played more lightly around 
the edge of feeling than when he said : — 

"As on the gauzy wiiigs of fancy flying 

From some far orb I track our watery sphere, 

Home of the struggling, suffering, doubting, dying. 

The silvered globule seems a glistening tear." 

Six more years have been added to the youth of 
his old age, and in them, if not so prolific as once, he 
has given us some of his neatest work in verse and 
prose. These efforts have not died with the occasions 
that called them out. Their beauty, it is true, took 
on increase by the manner in which the author suited 
his action to his word. The youth, who has heard 
this last of the recitationists deliver one of his poems, 
will recall in future years the fire and spirit of a vet- 
eran whose heart was in his work, who reads a stanza 
with the poetic inflection that no elocutionist can 
equal, who with it gives you so much of himself — the 
sparkling eye, the twinkling by-play of the mouth, the 
nervous frame on tip-toe in chase of imagery unleashed 
and coursing. Such a poet lifts the glow and fancy 
of the moment into the region of art, but of the art 
which must be enacted to bring out its full effect, 
and in which no actor save the artist himself can 
satisfactorily essay the single role. 



His gift Oj 
delivery. 



302 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 



Final im- 
pressions 
of his 
verse and 
frose. 



IV. 

If the question is asked, Would the verse of Doc- 
tor Holmes be held in so much favor if he had not 
confirmed his reputation by prose replete with poetic 
humor and analogy ? the fairest answer may be in the 
negative. Together, his writings surely owe their 
main success to an approximate exhibition of the au- 
thor himself. Where the man is even more lively 
than his work, the public takes kindly to the one and 
the other. The jester is privileged though in the court 
of art and letters ; yet if one could apply to Holmes 
— the jester, homilist, and man of feeling — his own 
process, we should have analysis indeed. Were the 
theme assigned to himself, we should have an inimi- 
tably honest setting forth of his merits and foibles, 
from this keen anatomist of mind and body, this smile- 
begetter, this purveyor to so many feasts. As a New 
Englander he long ago was awarded the highest sec- 
tional praise, — that of being, among all his tribe, the 
cutest. His cleverness and versatility bewilder out- 
side judges. Is he a genius? By all means. And 
in what degree ? His prose, for the most part, is pe- 
culiarly original. His serious poetry scarcely has been 
the serious work of his life ; but in his specialty, verse 
suited to the frolic or pathos of occasions, he has 
given us much of the best delivered in his own time, 
and has excelled all others in delivery. Both his 
strength and weakness lie in his genial temper and 
his brisk, speculative habit of mind. For, though al- 
most the only modern poet who has infused enough 
spirit into table and rostrum verse to make it wortk 
recording, his poetry has appealed to the present rathei 
than the future ; and, again, he has too curious and 
analytic a brain for purely artistic work. Of Holmes 



POET OF MANNERS AND THE TIME. 



303 



as a satirist, which it is not unusual to call ]iim, I 
have said but little. His metrical satires are of the 
amiable sort that debars him from kinsmanship with 
the Juvenals of old, or the Popes and Churchills of 
more recent times. There is more real satire in one 
of Hosea Biglow's lyrics than in all our laughing phi- 
losopher's irony, rhymed and unrhymed. Yet he is 
a keen observer of the follies and chances which sa- 
tire makes its food. Give him personages, reminis- 
cences, manners, to touch upon, and he is quite at 
home. He may not reproduce these imaginatively, in 
their stronger combinations ; but the Autocrat makes 
no unseemly boast when he says : " It was in talking 
of Life that we came together. I thought I knew 
something about that, that I could speak or write 
about it to some purpose." Let us consider, then, 
that if Holmes had died young, we should have missed 
a choice example of the New England fibre which 
strengthens while it lasts ; that he has lived to round 
a personality that will be traditional for at least the 
time granted to one or two less characteristic worthies 
of revolutionary days ; that a few of his lyrics already 
belong to our select anthology, and one or two of his 
books must be counted as striking factors in what 
twentieth-century chroniclers will term (and here is 
matter for reflection) the development of early Amer- 
ican literature. 



His harp 
" the h(xrp 
o/Life:' 



CHAPTER IX. 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 



A typical 
■man of 
letters. 



I 



Represent" 
ing^ also, 
A merican 



I. 

N a liberal sense, and somewhat as Emerson stands 
for American thought, the poet Lowell has become 
our representative man of letters. Not as our most 
laborious scholar, though of a rich scholarship, and 
soundly versed in branches which he has chosen to 
follow. Not as an indomitable writer, yet, when he 
writes, from whom else are we as sure to receive what 
is brilliant and original ? Nor yet chiefly as a poet, 
in spite of the ideality, the feeling, the purpose, and 
the wit that belong to his verse and that first brought 
him into reputation. But, whatsoever the conjunction 
that has enabled Mr. Lowell to reach and maintain 
his typical position, we feel that he holds it, and, on 
the whole, ought to hold it. His acquirements and 
versatile writings, the conditions of his life, his inter- 
national honors, the mould of the man, his speech^ 
bearing, and the spirit of his whole work, have given 
him a peculiar distinction, and this largely without his 
thought or seeking. Such a nimbus does not form 
around one who summons it : it glows and gathers 
almost without his knowledge, — and not at once, but 
like the expression of a noble face, after long expe- 
rience and service. 

I have spoken of one poet as excelling others in 
the adroitness of a man of the world. Lowell's qual- 



REP UBLIC/i N CUL TURE. 



305 



ities secure him honor and alhes without the need 
of adroitness. He is regarded not only as a man of 
letters, but as a line exemplar of culture, and of a 
culture so generous as to be thought supra-American 
by those observers who, while pronouncing him a citi- 
zen of the world, are careful to exclude this country 
from his range. Professor Dowden, for instance, says : 
" Taken as a whole, the works of Lowell do not mir- 
ror the life, the thoughts, and passions of the nation. 
They are works, as it were, of an English poet who 
has become a naturalized citizen of the United States ; 
who admires the institutions and has faith in the ideas 
of America, but who cannot throw off his allegiance 
to the old country and its authorities." But here is 
a manifest assumption. Doubtless, Lowell's mirror 
does not reflect Dr. Dowden 's conception of the life, 
the thoughts, and passions of this nation, but that 
conception, formed at such a distance, might be re- 
vised upon a close approach. In the poet's writings 
w^e find the life and passion of New England, to a 
verity, and the best thought of our people at large. 
For, when I say that he is a type of American culture, 
I mean of republican culture, and nothing more or less. 
Those who hold to the republican idea believe that 
its value is to be found in its levelling tendency ; by 
which I do not mean a general reduction to the low- 
est caste, but the gradual elevation of a multitude 
to the standard which individuals have reached, — 
among them so many of the writing craft, from Frank- 
lin's generation to our own. In this respect I do not, 
of course, mention Lowell's position as distinctive, — 
the names of other scholars and writers instantly come 
to mind, — nor have our men of culture been confined 
to any guild or profession. Marshall and Story, 
Pinkney, Wirt, Winthrop, Sumner and Bayard, jurists, 
20 



culture at 
its best. 



D(nuden''s 
" Sttidies 
171 L.iterO' 

tnre,'" 
p. 472. 



The Re- 
publicati 
idea, viz. 



To ad- 
7'ance tJie 
general 
syade of 
Cidture, 
equally 
with that 
of ftjate- 
rial wel- 
fare. 



3o6 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 



LowelVs 
special 
gtiality 
and stand- 
ing. 



Catholic^ 



orators, and statesmen, — soldiers, merchants, artisans, 
Americans of every class, — have shown that culture 
is a plant that thrives in a republic no less than under 
royal care. Their number is increasing ; the average 
grade is advanced. If this were not so, republican- 
ism would be a failure : in this matter it is on trial no 
less than in its ability to promote the establishment 
of first-class museums, libraries, academies, even with- 
out governmental aid. 

We count Lowell, among others, as a specimen not 
of foreign, but of home, culture, and especially of our 
Eastern type. His life shows what the New England 
training, not always so fortunate, can do for a man 
of genius. And thus, even aside from his writings, 
he is a person of note. The tributes frequently paid 
him would of themselves keep his name before us. 
Many of his sayings, like those of Emerson, are a 
portion of our usual discourse and reference, and the 
people have taken some of his lyrics faithfully to heart. 
He has written one work that has become a classic. 
Whether as a poet and critic, or as a man of affairs, 
of rare breeding and the healthiest moral tone, Lowell 
is one of whom it may be affirmed, in the words ap- 
plied to another, that a thing derives more weight 
from the fact that he has said it. Are we conscious, 
then, of having in view a man better than his best 
writings ? But this may be said of many authors, and 
there must be, at all events, a live personahty behind 
good work. 

Lowell's sense of this, and of the strength and ful- 
ness of existence, keep him void of conceit. He often 
has seemed impatient of his art, half-ready to cry out 
upon it, lest it lead him from green fields and forests, 
from the delight of life itself. He is not swift to 
magnify his office above the heroic action of other mea 



HIS BREEDING. 



307 



This catholicity is rare among poets and artists, whose 
clearest failing is a lack of concern for people or 
things not associated with their own pursuits. On the 
other hand, poetry is the choicest expression of hu- 
man life, and the poet who does not revere his art 
and believe in its sovereignty is not born to wear the 
purple. Lowell, in fortunate seasons, goes back from 
life to song with new vigor and wisdom, and with a 
loyalty strengthened by experiences. After all, the 
man dies, while his imaginative works may survive 
even the record of his name. Therefore the work is 
the essential thing ; and Lowell's work, above all, is 
so imbued with his individuality, that none can over- 
look the relations of the one to the other, or fail, in 
comprehending his poetry, to enter into the make and 
spirit of the poet himself. 



IL 

Mr. Underwood has given some account of Low- 
ell's ancestry, and of the conditions which led to the 
birth and breeding of a poet. We have a picture of 
the Cambridge manor, Elmwood, — a home not want- 
ing in the relics of an old - time family, — portraits, 
books, and things of art. Lowell's father, and his 
father's father, were clergymen, well-read, bearing hon- 
ored names ; his^mother, a gifted woman, the mistress 
of various languages, and loving the old English songs 
and ballads, — no wonder that three of her children 
came to be authors, and this one, the youngest, a fa- 
mous citizen and poet. It is not hard to fill in these 
outlines with something of the circumstance that, as I 
pointed out in the case of Mrs. Browning, fore-ordains 
the training of a genius ; that supplies, I repeat, the 
means of its self-training, since the imagination de- 



Musa 
Kcgina. 



James 
Russell 
Loivell : 
borfi in 
Cam- 
bridge, 
Alass. , 
Feb. 22, 
1819. 



Cp. " Vic 
torian 
Poets " .• 
p. 118. 



3o8 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 



Entered 
Harvard 
in 1834. 



Bent. 



Surround- 
ings. 



Old Style 
•ss. New. 



rives its sustenance like a plant, selecting and assim- 
ilating for itself. All it needs is food, atmosphere, a 
place to grow. In these Lowell was exceptionally 
favored, under the influence of local and family tra- 
ditions, the home-culture, the method of his father, and 
the taste of the mother from whom he inherited his 
bent toward letters and song. 

His college course made little change in this way of 
growth. He might fail of advantages to be gained 
from drill and drudgery; but was sure to extend his 
reading in the direction of his natural tastes, until ac- 
quainted with many literatures. His subsequent study 
of the law probably added the logical discipline that 
enables one to formulate ideas. But any voice that 
would restrict him to his profession must have fallen 
"vainlier than the hen's to her false chickens in the 
pool." Instinct, judgment, everything, pointed to let- 
ters as his calling. The period of his start, and his 
father's literary tastes, are indicated by his avowal that 
he was brought up " in the old superstition " that Pope 
" was the greatest poet that ever lived." This would 
account for his escape to the school of beauty and 
romance ; just as the repression of a clerical sur- 
rounding may have had much to do with his early 
liberalism in politics and theology. 

It seems that the light-hearted Cambridge student 
was eager for all books except those of the curricu- 
lum, and troubled himself little as to mathematics and 
other prosaic branches. This was quite in accordance 
with precedent, teste Landor or Shelley, yet I doubt 
not that he was more than once sorry for it in after 
years. One may assume, however, that he passed for 
what he was, or promised to be, with the Faculty, 
and became something of an oracle among his mates, 
There was more eagerness then, at Harvard, than now; 



A YEAR'S life: 



309 



the young fellows were not ashamed to wear their 
hearts upon their sleeves. The gospel of indifferent- 
ism had not been preached. The words "clever" and 
" well-equipped " now seem to express our highest 
good ; we avoid sentimentalism, but nourish less that 
genius which thrives in youth upon hopefully garnished 
food. 

Lowell wrote the Class Poem, and took leave to 
print it, being under discipline at the time appointed 
for its delivery. Mr. Sanborn neatly points out that 
it abounded in conventional satire of the new-fangled 
reformers whom the poet was soon to join. As a law 
graduate, he shortly clouded his professional chances 
by writing for the Boston " Miscellany," and issuing a 
little book of verse. A writer's first venture is apt to 
be a novel or poem. Should he grow in station, it be- 
comes rare, or valued for its indications. The thin, 
pretty volume, A Yearns Life, does show traits of its 
author's after-work, but not so distinctly as many books 
of the kind. Three years later he termed its con- 
tents, — 

" the firstlings of my muse, 
Poor windfalls of unripe experience." 

But three years are a long time in the twenties. There 
are a few ideal passages in this book, and some that 
suggest his forming tendencies. It was inscribed to 
" Una," whom he aptly might have called Egeria, for 
she was already both the inspirer and the sharer of his 
best imaginings. A few^ well-chosen pieces are re- 
tained in the opening division of Mr. Lowell's stand- 
ard collection. Of these, " Threnodia " is a good 
specimen of his early manner. The simple and natural 
lines " With a Pressed Flower " are in contrast with 
vaguer portions of the first book, and have a charac- 
teristic thought in the closing stanza, Vv'here he says 
of flowers, that 



"■A Poem 
recited at 
Ca}7i- 
hridge,'''' 
1839. 



'■'■A Year's 
Lifer 



Maria 
White. 



3IO 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 



Early 
range and 
tendencies. 



" The 
Pioneer " ; 
id. by 
Lowell 
tind Rob- 
ert Carter. 



" Nature, ever kind to love, 
Hath granted them the same sweet tongue, 
Whether with German skies above, 
Or here our granite rocks among." 

The cullings from "A Year's Life," with various 
and riper odes, lyrics, and sonnets, make up the " Early 
Poems " of his latest edition, showing his range at 
the date of their production. 

Some of the longer pieces lack compactness, and 
betray an imagination still somewhat nebulous. " The 
Sirens," " Irene'," " My Love," " Rosaline," are like 
the first poems of Tennyson, then a risen star. There 
is a trace of Shelley in the lines "To Perdita, Sing- 
ing," and "The Moon." "AUegra" is sweet, direct, 
original. The sonnets upon reading Wordsworth, a 
sonnet to Spenser (in " A Year's Life "), and one to 
Keats, afford hints of the poet's healthy tastes. Those 
to Phillips and Giddings prove that he was no laggard 
in the unpopular antislavery movement. As to other 
reforms, it is plain that he began to have convictions, 
— - or, at least, to have a conviction that he had con- 
victions. "The Heritage" and "A Rich Man's Son" 
were taken up by the press, and are still found in our 
school-readers. Lowell's voice was for independence, 
human rights, the dignity of labor. Some of the love- 
poetry is exquisite. Its serenity declares that no other 
word than happiness is needed for the history of the 
time between the dates of his first and second books. 
To be sure, he set himself to edit The Pioneer^ the 
conditions being so adverse that poets and essayists 
who now should make the fortune of a magazine could 
not prolong its short existence. But we think of Low- 
ell as enjoying to the full those three zestful years, — 
a briefless barrister, perhaps, yet guarded by the Muse, 
and having the refined companionship of the gir/ 



MATURER VERSE. 



3^1 



ivhose love he sought and won. In the year of his 
marriage to Maria White, he pubHshed a second vol- 
ume, whose cont.ents, with other verse composed be- 
fore " Sir Launfal," exhibit his poetic genius in its 
fresh maturity. 

The " Legend of Brittany," an artistic and legen- 
dary poem, was, for that time, quite a significant pro- 
duction, so much so that Poe said it was " the noblest 
poem yet written by an American." It commended 
itself to him because, unlike some of Lowell's verse, 
it was designed for poetry and nothing else — it is not 
in the least didactic. And that Poe said this, and 
meant it, shows how few were the longer poems of 
merit w^e then had produced. The Legend is a sweet, 
flowing tale, in the ottava ri7?ia, after the mode of 
Keats and up to the standard of Leigh Hunt. It 
needs dramatic force in the climax, but is simple and 
delicately finished. A still better piece of art-work is 
" Rhoecus," that Greek legend of the wood-nymph and 
the bee. The poet by chance subjected himself, and 
not discreditably, to the test of a comparison with the 
most bewitching of Landor's Hellenics, "The Hama- 
dryad." Much might be said, in view of these two 
idyls, upon the antique and modern handlings of a 
theme. Landor worked as a Grecian might, giving 
the tale in chiselled verse, with no curious regard 
for its teachings. Its beauty is enough for him, 
and there it stands — a Periclean vase. His instinct 
became a conscious method. In a letter to Forster 
he begs him to amend the poem by striking out a 
bit of " reflection " which a true hamadryad should 
" cut across " : — 

" Why should the beautiful 
(And thou art beautiful) disturb the source 
Whence springs all beauty ? " 



" Poems," 
1S44. 

" A Le- 
ge^id of 



C077if>ared 
zvith Lan- 
dor's '"''The 
Havta- 
dryad:' 



312 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 



The an- 
tique and 
■modern 
■purposes 
contrasted. 



The poet 
obeys a 
''caliy 



His ear- 
nestness 
sincere. 



Mr. Lowell's " Rhoecus " is an example of the mod- 
ern feeling. Passages such as that beginning : — 

"A youth named Rhoecus, wandering in the wood," 
are simple and lovely ; the scene where Rhoecus, play- 
ing dice, rudely treats the winged messenger, is a pic- 
ture equalling the best of Landor's. But the story 
itself is preceded by a moralizing commentary, and 
other glosses of the same kind are here and there. 
The whole is treated as an allegory conveying a les- 
son. The wood-nymph herself draws one, tenderly 
and sadly, at the close : — 

"'Alas!' the voice returned, ''tis thou art bHnd, 
Not I unmerciful. I can forgive, 
But have no skill to heal thy spirit's eyes ; 
Only the soul hath power o'er itself.' " 

This method confuses the beauty of the poem, 
though distinct enough in purpose, and characteristic 
of the New England school. 

The poet, in truth, felt himself called upon for secu- 
lar work. With all his love of beauty, he had a greater 
dread of dilettanteism. The air was full of " progress," 
and he made a general assay of the new thoughts and 
enthusiasms. Reform-verse came naturally from the 
young idealist portrayed by his friend Page. The 
broad collar and high - parted, flowing hair set off a 
handsome, eager face, with the look of Keats and the 
resolve of a Brook-Farmer. But he was wholly him- 
self, incapable of the affectation which — in a time 
when poetry is not the first choice of readers — mar- 
kets its wares by posing for the jest and zest of fash- 
ion, and brings into contempt the grand old name of 
poet among those who know poetry only as a name. 
Affectation and self-seeking in art, as elsewhere, are 
detestable. All the genius of Byron, in a romantic 
period, could not atone for his trace of the former. 



PROGRESSIVE TEXDEXCIES. 



1 T 1 



l>ane of 
art. 



It makes no difference whether the affectation be one Aff,'cta 
of viriUty or of refinement ; the self-seeking is apt to 
be that of the author or artist who devotes one day in 
the month to work, and all the rest to advertising it. 
You may see his outward type in the water-fly Osric, 
of whom Hamlet says that " 'tis a vice to know him." 
Such creatures and their habits are the breed of special 
times — men with some bit of talent, gaining their 
paltry ends, and sure to be duly classified at last. And 
so Osric, as Hamlet disdainfully perceives, with " many 
more of the same breed that the drossy age dotes on," 
has "only got the tune of the time ... a kind 
of yesty collection, which carries them through and 
through the most fond and winnowed opinions." But 
Lowell, I say, was himself alone, wearing his Arcadian 
garb, yet hasting to throw aside his crook at the 
sound of the trumpet. His " progressive " verse often 
was fuller of opinion than beauty, of eloquence than 
passion. Some of it is in a measure which reformers 
have seemed to hit upon by an exasperating instinct 
— the much-abused verse shown at its best in " Locks- 
ley Hall." With the typical radical, it is enough to 
make a thing wrong that it is accepted by a majority. 
Lowell found himself with the minority, but the minor- 
ity then chanced to be the party of a future, and, in 
essentials, wholly right. If Whittier and himself, like 
the Lake Poets before them, became didactic through 
moral earnestness, it none the less aided to inspire 
them. Their verse advanced a great cause, and, as 
years went by, grew in quality — perhaps as surely as 
that of poets who, in youth, reject aH but artistic con- 
siderations. 

Before Lowell's thought and imagination had gained 
their richness, he had to contend with a disproportion- 
ate flow of language, if using forms that did not of 



LowelVs 
reform- 
verse. 



" Poems,'^ 
1S48 ; attd 
'■^Poetical 
IVorks;' 
2 v., 1850. 



3H 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 



Diffuse- 
ness. 

Frequent 
strength of 
thought 
and vian- 



Eccentrici- 
ties of 
ityle. 



themselves restrict it. " Prometheus," " Columbus," 
'' A Glance Behind the Curtain," are studies upon 
massive themes, weakened because their matter is not 
compactly moulded. Yet the poet had a terse art of 
saying things, as when he made Cromwell assert that 

" New times demand new measures and new men " ; 
and himself said : — 

" They are slaves who dare not be 
In the right with two or three," 

or, similarly, declared for 

" One faith against a whole earth's unbelief, 
One soul against the flesh of all mankind." 

His manner often was fine : — 

" All other glories are as falling stars, 
But universal Nature watches theirs, 
Such strength is won by love of human kind." 

" The moon will come and go 
With her monotonous vicissitude." 

" The melancholy wash of endless waves." 

His analytic turn early cropped out in the " Studies 
for Two Heads," which is all Lowell — as one now 
would say. The poem " To the Past " is written with 
more circumstance than Bryant's, but the latter is the 
more imaginative. To indicate, finally, the chief res- 
ervation of Mr. Lowell's admirers, I must own that 
these poems often are marked with technical blem- 
ishes, from which even his later verse is not exempt. 
In trying both to express his conviction and to find a 
method of his own, he betrayed an irregular ear, and 
a voice rare in quality, but not wholly to be relied 
upon. He had a way, moreover, of " dropping " like 
his own bobolink, of letting down his fine passages 
with odd conceits, mixed metaphors, and licenses 



A NATIVE BUT CAPRICIOUS SOXGSTER. 



15 



which as a critic he would not overlook in another. 
To all this add a knack of coining uncouth words for 
special tints of meaning, when there are good enough 
counters in the language for any poet's need. Space 
can be more agreeably used than by citing examples 
of these failings, which a reader soon discovers for 
himself. They have perplexed the poet's friends and 
teased his reviewers. Although such defects some- 
times bring a man's work nearer to us, the question is 
as to their influence upon its permanent value. Verse 
may be faultily .faultless, or may go to the other ex- 
treme. We are indebted, as usual, to Lowell himself 
for our critical test. Writing of Wordsworth, he says 
that " the work must surpass the material," and refers 
to " that shaping imagination which is the highest 
criterion of a poet." 

It is a labor that physics pain to recall the verse 
by which he gained that hold upon his countrymen 
which strengthens through lengthening years. The 
public was right in its liking for '' The Changeling," 
"She Came and Went," " The First Snow-Fall," than 
which there are few more touching lyrics of the affec- 
tions. " The Shepherd of Admetus " and " An Inci- 
dent in a Railway Car " are on themes which moved 
the poet to harmonize his taste and thought. When 
called upon, as he supposed, to make a choice between 
Taste and his conception of Duty, Taste sometimes 
went to the wall. Doubtless, he grew to see that the 
line of Beauty does not always follow Duty's follower, 
and that the surrender of the former itself may be in 
the nature of a crime. His sense never was more 
subtle, his taste never mcfre delightful, than in the 
recent and flawless stanzas on the " Phoebe." The 
public keeps in store for him the adage of the wilful 
sottgster. That he " can " sing was discovered at the 



Lyrical 
beauty. 



%i6 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, 



LowclVs 
theory of 
song. 



outset, 
point : • 



It also 
one : — - 



One such piece as " Hebe " decided that 

" I saw the twinkle of white feet, 
I saw the flash of robes descendins^ ; 

Before her ran an influence fleet 
That bowed my heart like barley bending." 

included his theory of song, and a sound 

" Coy Hebe flies from those that woo. 
And shuns the hands would seize upon her \ 

Follow thy life, and she will sue 
To pour for thee the cup of honor." 



To this lesson of his own experience he recurs again 

and again : — 

" Whither ? Albeit I follcjw fast, 
In all life's circuit I but find, 
Not where thou art, but where thou wast, 
Sweet beckoner, more fleet than wind ! 

All of thee but thyself I grasp ; 

I seem to fold thy luring shape, 
And vague air to my bosom clasp, 

Thou lithe, perpetual Escape ! " 

Like other poets of quality, Lowell has found the 
Muse, between her inspirations, a coquette and evader. 
He forms his rule accordingly : — 

" Now, I 've a notion, if a poet 
Beat up for themes, his verse will show it; 
I wait for subjects that hunt me, 
By day or night won't let me be, 
And hang about me like a curse, 
Till they have made me into verse." 

From a poet who does this, we shall get flavor, and, 
in any event, the best of himself. Lowell's career, 
telling equally of use and song, has proved the wis* 
dom of his admonitions : — 



POET OF THE OPEN AIR. 



17 



" Harass her not ; thy heat and stir 
But greater coyness breed in her ; 

The Muse is womanish, nor deigns 
Her love to him that pules and plains ; 

The epic of a man rehearse, 
Be something better than thy verse ; 
Make thyself rich, and then the Muse 
Shall court thy precious interviews, 
vShall take thy head upon her knee, 
And such enchantment lilt to thee, 
That thou shalt hear the life-blood flow 
From farthest stars to grass-blades low," 

To which one may add, without malice, that Mr. Low- 
ell can give the Muse lessons in the art of flirting ; 
knowing from long practice that, when she once has 
yielded her heart, she forgives even the infidelities of 
a favored lover. 

There is a beautiful feeling in his poems of nature. 
Wordsworth has dwelt upon the contrast between the 
youthful regard for nature, — the feeling of a healthy 
and impassioned child, — and that of the philosopher 
who finds in her a sense " of something far more 
deeply interfused." The latter is a gift that makes us 
grave. It led Bryant to worship and invocation ; and 
now, in the new light of science, we seek for, rather 
than feel, the soul of things. The charm of Lowell's 
outdoor verse lies in its spontaneity ; he loves nature 
with a child-like joy, her boon companion, finding even 
in her illusions welcome and relief, — just as one gives 
himself up to a story or a play, and will not be a 
doubter. Here he never ages, and he beguiles you 
and me to share his joy. It does me good to see a 
poet who knows a bird or flower as one friend knows 
another, yet loves it for itself alone. He sings among 
the woods, as Boone hunted, refusing to be edified, 



A born 
poet 0/ 
nature. 



3i8 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 



His pas- 
toral 
tastes. 



and with no wish for improvements. This one section 
he reserves for life itself : — 

" Away, my poets, whose sweet spell 
Can make a garden of a cell ! 
I need ye not, for I to-day 
Will make one long sweet verse of play." 

His manhood shall not make him lose his boyhood \ 
the whiff of the woods, the brook's voice, the spangle 
of spring-flowers, — these never fail to stir the old- 
time thrill ; our hearts leap with his, and for once for- 
get to ask the reason why. 

Outside the " Pictures from Appledore " there is 
little of the ocean in his verse : the sea-breeze brings 
fewer messages to him than to Longfellow and Whit- 
tier. His sense of inland nature is all the more alert, 
— for him the sweet security of meadow-paths and 
orchard-closes. He has the pioneer heart, to which a 
homestead farm is dear and familiar, and native woods 
and waters are an intoxication. The American, im- 
pressed at first by the oaks and reaches of an Old- 
World park, soon wearies of them, and takes like a 
partridge to the bush. What Lowell loves most in 
nature are the trees and their winged habitants, and 
the flowers that grow untended. " The Indian Sum- 
mer Reverie " is an early and delightful avowal of his 
pastoral tastes. His favorite birds and trees, the 
meadows, river, and marshes, all are there, put in 
with strokes no modern descriptive poet has excelled. 
Browning's capture of the thrush's song is rivalled by 
such a touch as this : — 

" Meanwhile that devil-may-care, the bobolink, 
Remembering duty, in mid-quaver stops 

Just ere he sweeps o'er rapture's tremulous brink, 
And 'twixt the winrows most demurely drops." 

The poems " To a Pine-Tree " and " The Birch- 



' VISION OF SIR launfal: 



319 



Tree," with their suggestive measures, are companion- 
pieces that will last. The poet shares the stormy reign 
of the monarch of Katahdin ; yet loves the whisper of 
the birch in the vale : — 

" Thou art the go-between of rustic lovers ; 
Thy white bark has their secrets in its keeping ; 
Reuben writes here the happy name of Patience, 
And thy lithe boughs hang murmuring and weeping 
Above her, as she steals the mystery from thy keeping." 

Of Lowell's earlier pieces, the one which shows the 
finest sense of the poetry of Nature is that addressed 
"To the Dandelion." The opening phrase ranks with 
the selectest of Wordsworth and Keats, to whom imag- 
inative diction came intuitively, — ., 

** Dear common flower, that grow'st beside the way, 
Fringing the dusty road with harmless gold," 

and both thought and language are felicitous through- 
out : — 

" Thou art my tropics and mine Italy ; 
To look at thee unlocks a warmer clime ; 

The eyes thou givest me 
Are in the heart, and heed not space or time : 
Not in mid June the golden-cuirassed bee 
Feels a more summer-like warm ravishment 
In the white lily's breezy tent, 
His fragrant Sybaris, than I, when first 
From the dark green thy yellow circles burst." 

This poem contains many of its author's peculiar beau- 
ties and none of his faults ; it was the outcome of the 
mood that can summon a rare spirit of art to express 
the gladdest thought and most elusive feeling. 

I think, also, that The Visioji of Sir Laimfal owed 
its success quite as much to a presentation of nature 
as to its misty legend. It really is a landscape-poem, 
of which the lovely passage, " And what is so rare as 
a day in June 1 " and the wintry prelude to Part Sec- 



Poem ''Ta 
the Dandc 
lion:' 



" The 
Vision of 
Sir Laiirt 
fai;' 1S4& 



320 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 



Estimate 
of his 
work thus 
far. 



A new 
peld. 



ond, are the specific features. Like the Legend of 
Brittany, it was a return to poetry as poetry, and a sign 
that the author was groping for a therne equal to his 
reserved strength. The Vinland fragment hints at 
a wider range of experiment. Thus far, in fact, no 
positively new notes. Lowell had shown his art and 
insight, a brave purpose, absolute sympathy with na- 
ture. The ferment of his youth had worked itself 
clear. " Occasional " pieces, the stanzas to Kossuth, 
the poem on the English graves at Concord, came 
from definite convictions and a strong hand. He was 
a man, well girded, who had not found his best oc 
casion ; who needed the pressure of imminent events 
to bring out his resources and make his work endur- 
ing. The question, " How can I make a real addition 
to literature ? " often must have come to one so pen- 
etrative. Possibly he was hampered, also, by his own 
culture. The Dervish's ointment may be too freely 
applied to the eyes ; too close a knowledge of the ver- 
ities may check ideal effort, — too just a balance of 
faculties produces indecision. Practical success in art 
must come from every-day ambition and experiment. 
But creative results are apt to follow upon the gift 
to look at things from without. If Lowell had not 
utilized his surroundings, he was none the less aware 
of them. The solution of his problem came when 
least expected, and as a confirmation of his theory of 
the Unsought. The clew was not in ancestral or Ar- 
thurian legends, but in his own time and at his door- 
stone. It was woven of the homeliest, the most un- 
gainly, material. It led to something so fresh and 
unique that its value, like that of other positively new 
work, at first hardly could have been manifest, even to 
the poet himself. 



« THE BIGLOW PAPERS: 



321 



III. 



The Biglow Papers ended all question of Lowell's 
originality. They are a master-work, in which his ripe 
genius fastened the spirit of its region and period. 
Their strength lies in qualities which, as here combined, 
were no man's save his own. They declare the faith of 
a sincere and intelligent party with respect to war, — a 
sentiment called out by the invasion of Mexico, unjust 
in itself, but now seen to be a historical factor in the 
world's progress. This was a minority faith, held in 
vulgar contempt, and there was boldness in declaring 
it. Again, the " Biglow Papers " were the first, and 
are thcsbest, metrical presentation of Yankee character 
in its thought, dialect, manners, and singular mixture 
of coarseness and shrewdness with the fundamental 
sense of beauty and right. Never sprang the flower 
of art from a more unpromising soil ; yet these are 
eclogues as true as those of Theocritus or Burns. 
Finally, they are not merely objective studies, but 
charged with the poet's own passion, and bearing the 
marks of a scholar's hand. 

The work plainly shows its manner of growth. The 
first lyric struck the vein, the poet's mind took fire by 
its own friction, and one effort inspired another. The 
" Papers " made an immediate " hit " ; the public in- 
stinctively passed a judgment upon them, in which crit- 
ics were able to concur after the poet had made an 
opus of the collected series. Here was now seen that 
maturity of genius, of which Humor is a flower revealing 
the sound kind man within the poet. Such a work is, 
also, an illustration and defence of the tenure of Wit 
in the field of art. Verse made only as satire belongs 
to a lower order. Of such there are various didac- 



'- Tlie 
Bigloiv 
Papers-, ' 
1S46-40. 



IV it and 

Hu7U r. 

TIteh .'en- 
ure ;.-.• '^r! 
See pp. 2-c) 

cp. " i'ic- ' 
toriau 
Poets'-' : 
PP- 73. n, 
352. 



21 



322 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 



A broadly 

original 

work. 



Realism, 



tic specimens. But Wit has an imaginative side, and 
Humor springs like Iris — -all smiles and tears. The 
wit of poets often has been the faculty that ripened 
last, the overflow of their strength and experience. In 
the " Biglow Papers," wit and humor are united as in 
a composition of high grade. The jesting is far re- 
moved from that clownish gabble which, if it still in^ 
creases, will shortly add another to the list of offences 
that make killing no murder. 

Lowell was under thirty at this time, and fairly may 
be reckoned among poets who have done great work 
in youth. His leap from provincialism is seen in the 
accessory divisions of his completed satire. The " No- 
tices of an Independent Press " are a polygonal mirror 
in which journalism saw all its sins reflected, and 
wherewith he scanned not others' follies only, but his 
own, mocking our spread-eagleism, anglophobia, and 
the weaker phases of movements in which he himstlf 
had joined. He burlesqued in mock Latin the vener- 
able pomp of college-catalogues and down-East gene- 
alogies. Then followed a clever analysis of the Yankee 
dialect, extended and made authoritative in a prefix to 
his second series. In the very first contribution of Mr. 
Biglow, the native Yankee is immortally portrayed.. 
The ludicrous realism of the transcript is without 
parallel : — 

"Jest go home an' ask our Nancy 

Wether I 'd be sech a goose 
Ez to jine ye, — guess you 'd fancy 

The etarnal bung wuz loose ! 
She wants me fer home consumption, 

Let alone the hay 's to mow, — 
Ef you 're arter folks o' gumption, 

You 've a darned long row to hoe." 

How the poet must have enjoyed that stanza ! Whaf 
rollicking delight ! But he quickly recalls the inborii 



'THE COURTIN'; ETC. 



Z'^Z 



pride and patriotism, the sacred wrath, of the true 
New England, and cries out from a wounded spirit : — 

"Massachusetts, God forgive her, 
She 's a-kneelin' with the rest, 
She thet ough' to ha' clung tcrever 
In her grand old eagle-nest ! " 

His rejection of the popular ideal of \\^ebster, his 
branding ridicule of Robinson, Gushing, and their like, 
and his scorn of trimmers, vitalized the " Biglow Pa- 
pers " and make their hits proverbial. The first se- 
ries was a protest not only against the slave-holders' 
invasion of Mexico, but against war itself. Fifteen 
years later a greater war arose, a mortal struggle to 
repress the wrong that caused the first. To such a 
conflict even Lowell could not say nay; his kinsmen 
freely gave their blood, and bereavement after bereave- 
ment came fast upon him. In the second series of 
the " Biglow Papers " the humor is more grim, the 
general feeling more intense. Still they are not Tyr- 
taean strains, but chiefly called out by political epi- 
sodes, — like the Mason and Slidell affair, — and 
constantly the poet seeks a relief from the tension of 
the hour. One feels this in reading the dialogue 
between the Bridge and the Monument at Concord 
suggested by Burns's "Twa Briggs," the return to 
" Sunthin' in the Pastoral Line," or, most of all, " The 
Courtin'." This bucolic idyl is without a counterpart ; 
no richer juice can be pressed from the wild-grape of 
the Yankee soil. It is a most artistic idealization of 
the theme and method essayed years before by a New 
Hampshire poet and wit, Fessenden, in " The Country 
Lovers." Of the Biglow epistles, the tenth has the 
most pathetic undertone. It was composed, seemingly 
at a heat, in answer to a request for — 



" TJts 

Biglow 

Papers,'' 

Second 

Series^ 

1862-66. 



" The 
Courtin''^ 



324 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, 



" Ozit of 
the abun- 
dafice of 
the heart.'''' 



" sunthin' light an' cute, 
Rattlin' an' shrewd an' kin' o' jingleish." 

Mr. Biglow justifies the tone of his new series by 
avowing the immeasurable anguish and perplexity of 
the time : — 

" Where 's Peace ? I start, some clear-blown night. 
When gaunt stone walls grow numb an' number. 
An', creakin' 'cross the snow-crus' white, 
Walk the col' starlight into summer." 

His heart is full with its own sorrows ; he half-despises 
himself ''for rhymin'," when his young kinsmen have 
fallen in the frays — 

'* Why, hain't I held 'em on my knee ? 
Did n't I love to see 'em growin', 
Three likely lads ez wal could be, 

Hahnsome an' brave an' not tu knowin' ? 

'T ain't right to hev the young go fust, 

All throbbin' full o' gifts an' graces, 
Leavin' life's paupers dry ez dust 

To try an' make b'lieve fill their places ! " 

He longs for Peace, but invokes her to come, — 

"not like a mourner, bowed 

For honor lost and dear ones wasted, 
But proud, to meet a people proud, 

With eyes thet tell o' triumph tasted ! 
Come, with han' grippin' on the hilt. 

An' step that proves ye Victory's daughter ! 
Longin' fer you, our sperits wilt 

Like shipwrecked men's on raf's for water," 

These final lyrics, less varied and sparkling than their 
predecessors, are, in not infrequent passages, more 
poetical. The author's statement of the causes . and 
method of his work is more suggestive than Poe's 
whimsical analysis of " The Raven," and not open to 
the suspicion of being written for effect. 



'A FABLE FOR CR/T/CS: 



325 



The "Biglow Papers," as we now have them, form 
a strongly proportioned work, and are a positive ad- 
dition to the serio-comic Uterature of the world. They 
are almost apart from criticism ; there is no prototype 
by \vhich to test them. Lowell has been compared to 
Butler, but " Hudibras," whether as poetry or histor- 
ical satire, is vastly below the master-work of the New 
England idyllist. The titles of a few great books, 
each of which has no fellow, come to mind as we think 
of its possible rank and duration, and I observe that 
Mr. Sanborn does not fear to mention the highest. 
It is a point in favor of transatlantic judgment that 
the " Biglow Papers " first gave Lowell the standing, 
with those who make opinion in England, which his 
choicest poems of art and nature had failed to pro- 
cure for him. From that time their interest in him- 
self and his work has been apparent. Their univer- 
sity degrees, their estimates of his genius and his 
character, declare him to be one whom the mother- 
land delights to honor, and have made more distinct 
the position which, as I have said, he holds among 
our men of letters. 

His literary satire, A Fable for Critics, w^as a good- 
natured tilt at the bards of Griswold's Parnassus, — 
a piece of uneven merit, but far from being open to 
the charge — that of malevolence — which Poe brought 
against it. The estimate of Poe is not unfair, and 
other sketches — such as those of Bryant, Hawthorne, 
Whittier, and Dwight — are deftly made. Nor could 
one put a surer finger upon Lowell's short-comings 
than his own in the lines upon himself. The allegory 
of the fable is trite. Its sections are loosely united, 
the language and rhythm are at hap-hazard, and, on 
the w^hole, it is a rather careless production, however 
true to the time and tribe it celebrates. 



A tniique 
add it io) I to 
literature. 



" A Fable 
for Crit- 
ics,'" 1848. 



326 



JAMES RUSSELL L^OWELL, 



LowelVs 
frose writ- 
ing's. 



*' Conver- 
sations on 
Some of 
the Old 
Poets,"" 
1844. 



Ed. the 

" A tlantic 
Monthly,'" 
1857-62. 

Ed.^ with 
C. E. Nor- 
ton, of the 
" No. A m. 
Review^'' 
1863-72. 



IV. 



A POET of intellectual scope will not content him- 
self with verse, as the sole outlet of his thought and 
feeling. Lowell's essays display his genius in free 
activity, and have added greatly, and justly, to his 
authority and standing. One could not select better 
illustrations of the union of the critical and artistiq 
faculties, or of the distinctions and analogies between 
the verse and prose of a poet. 

It is to be noted that Lowell's political and moral 
convictions appear chiefly in his verse. His prose 
appertains to literature, and, with the exception of 
some graceful sketch-work, bits of travel and reminis- 
cence, has been restricted to criticism. His earliest 
prose volume was of this kind, in the form of Conver- 
sations on the old poets and dramatists. These are 
the ardent generalizations of a young poet, apprecia- 
tive rather than searching. They are superseded by 
his maturer survey of their field, but had a stimulat- 
ing influence in their time. Many who were students 
then remember the glow which they felt when Lowell's 
early lectures and essays directed them to a sense of 
what is best in English song. Young enthusiasts, at 
Cambridge, found him an ideal teacher and professor 
of belles-lettres. As years went on, his critical pen 
was rarely idle. A good fate determined that he 
should be subjected to the demands of journalistic 
routine — that he should carry the " Atlantic Monthly " 
to a sure foot-hold, advancing the standard of our mag- 
azine literature ; and that he should afterward hold 
for nine years an editorship of the "North American 
Review." Such responsibilities overcome a writer's 
vis inertice. He naturally becomes his own best con- 



SKETCHES AND CRITICAL ESS A YS. 



327 



tributor, and it was, in a measure, to the spur of his 
engagements that we owe a notable series of hterary 
essays, many of which first appeared in the review I 
have named. PubUshers have not found his study a 
reservoir into which they might insert their taps at 
pleasure. But one must spend time in gathering 
knowledge to give it out richly, and few comprehend 
what goes to a page of Lowell's manuscript. The page 
itself, were it a letter or press-report, could be written 
in a quarter-hour; but suppose it represents, as in one 
of his greater essays, the result of prolonged studies 
— the reading, indexing, formulating works in various 
languages, upon his shelves or in the Harvard library ? 
Of all this he gives the ultimate quintessence, a dis- 
tillation fragrant with his own genius. Who can es- 
timate the toil of such work ? What can adequately 
pay for it ? There are two guerdons that raise the 
spirit to scorn delights and live laborious days : Mil- 
ton sings of one — but the surer is the " exceeding 
great reward " of the work itself. 

Lowell's important reviews and studies, selected with 
excellent discretion, are contained in My Study. Win- 
dows^ and in the first and second series of Among My 
Books. These, wdth the Fireside Travels, make up the 
collection, in four volumes, of his prose w^orks. His 
style is marked by individuality. Underwood suggests 
\hat " the distinctive prose of a poet is necessarily quite 
removed from general apprehension." The word "dis- 
tinctive " seems the one qualification that justifies the 
remark. And how is a poet's prose distinctive ? Not 
in rhythmic undulations, if he be a true poet and artist. 
Such a writer does not lend the semblance of verse 
to his prose. To do this, he must produce something 
inferior to either. Few metrical cadences in the prose 
of Milton, Goldsmith, Coleridge^ Byron, Landor, or 



" Fireside 
Travels, ^^ 
1S64. 

'M niong 

MyBooks,'^ 

1870. 

''My St7tdy 
Wiiidows^^ 
1871. 

''Antony 
MyBooks," 
Second Se- 
ries, 1S76. 

T/ie prose 
0/ poets. 
Cp. 

" Victo- 
rian Po- 
ets:'' p. zj. 



328 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 



Tndividw 
ality of 
Lowe IPs 
frose. 



The stric- 
tures tipoii 
it. 



Bryant. Its strength and beauty are of another kind. 
Many of Dickens's passages, we know, can be assorted 
into lengths of semi-metrical verse ; but Dickens, when 
he tried to make poems, had no great success. Thack- 
eray, whose prose is prose, was, within his range, a 
charming poet. Longfellow's " Hyperion " is excep- 
tional — written as a "prose-poem" by a young artist 
fresh from the sentiment of German mystics and ro- 
mances. As for Carlyle, he was a poet, as Lowell 
says, " without the gift of song." He invented a 
special kind of prose as his form of poetic expression. 
I infer that a poet's prose is not removed from general 
apprehension by its technique ; all things considered, I 
expect to find it as clear and unadulterate as that of 
any layman — not more illogical, not more dependent 
on the reader's intuition to fill out its lapses. A poet's 
instinct is constructive, little given to omissions in 
prose syntax. If his prose is hard to understand, it 
may be that he is a learned thinker, whose thoughts 
and references do not come at once within popular 
apprehension. 

It is because a poet is more original, not more er- 
ratic, than many laymen, that his prose often is so 
individual. Lowell's is clear enough to those familiar 
with the choicest literature. In critical exploits that 
bring out his resources, he is not a writer for dullards, 
and to read him enjoyably is a point in evidence of 
a liberal education. His manner, in fact, is Protean, 
adjusted to his topic, and has a flexibility that well 
expresses his racy wit and freshness : combined With 
this, peculiarities that irritate the most catholic minds. 
Outspoken reviewers have subjected it to minute anal- 
ysis, and declared their sense of its shortcomings. 
Their statement that it is not creative, but critical, is 
[true in the ordinary meaning; yet I doubt if "crea- 



HIS PROSE STYLE. 



329 



tive " criticism and that which is truly critical differ 
like the experimental and analytic chemistries. Cer- 
tainly Lowell is a most suggestive essayist. He sets 
us a-thinking, and, after a stretch of comment, halts 
in by-paths, or enlivens us with his sudden wit. He 
has the intellect, held to be a mark of greatness, that 
" puts in motion the intellect of others." But he is 
charged with querulousness, inconsistency of judgment, 
contempt for unity, and with the habit of becoming 
entangled in expression. Attention is directed to the 
conceits, the whimsical diction and recondite instances, 
to be found in these essays. Verse, not prose, is de- 
clared by a few to be his proper vehicle. The indict- 
ment has some foundation, but to what extent does 
it affect his general merits ? Things bad in themselves 
are often part of an author's essential quality. It 
seems to me that there is a close analogy between the 
styles of Lowell's verse and prose, distinct as the tw^o 
forms are, — an analogy to be observed, if I had space 
to point it out, in the verse and prose of other poets, 
and inevitable from an author's habits of mind. I 
cannot better state the matter than by saying that the 
beauties and faults of the one are those of the other ; 
both are open to the criticisms already made, and to 
which I may refer again ; but each is sustained by a 
spirit which makes the reader forgive and forget. Un- 
der the drift and stubble that float on the surface is 
the strong, deep current w^hich bears them along, or 
throws them to the side and keeps a central channel 
clear. 

Low^ell's lighter touches have the grace that is al- 
ways modern. The " Fireside Travels " make his cen- 
sors withhold their arrows of the chase, pleased wdth 
the landscape and the guide. However exquisite the 
art of our latest sketch-writers, who is better company 



Horufar ■ 
jiistifiable, 



Sketch' 
•work. 



330 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 



Greater 
Essays. 



His style. 



than Lowell in Old-World loiterings or more deft in 
wood-craft and garden-craft at home ? His other 
prose volumes have sturdier characteristics. Here are 
the companion-pieces on Lessing and Rousseau ; the 
series — a labor of years — upon the great English 
masters, from Chaucer to Keats and Carl3de ; the 
elaborate study of Dante ; the off-hand portraits of 
Josiah Quincy, Lincoln, Thoreau ; no common sub- 
jects these, — who grapples them must do his bestj or 
suffer a fall. Other essays, too, that are not soon 
forgotten : " Witchcraft in New England," the famous 
treatise " On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners," 
and two papers — " My Garden Acquaintance," and 
" A Good Word for Winter," — outdoor studies that 
would have delighted the man of Selborne. The style 
of the critical prose certainly is not modelled upon 
Addison and his school ; it is scarcely what Lowell 
himself describes as " that exquisite something called 
Style, which makes itself felt by the skill with which 
it effaces itself, and masters us at last with a sense 
of indefinable completeness." To some it may seem 
a stumbling-block ; but to most, I fancy, it is the self- 
expression of a versatile, learned, original man. When 
over-freighted with words from other languages, new 
and old, the polyglotism implies so close a familiarity 
with many literatures that he cannot avoid drawing 
on them for his purpose. A pedant quotes for the 
sake of a display of learning ; Lowell, because he has 
mastered everything connected with his theme. His 
style, as I have hinted, sometimes is quaintly in- 
fluenced by his topic and its associations. " Witch, 
craft " revives here and there the manner of more 
than one seventeenth-century homilist. The English 
proper of this curious and learned essay, with all its 
auroral qualities, is less simple and strong than that 



THE SCHOLAR, 



1 o r 



of ihe critic's noble discourse of Drydcn, whose very 
Latinism seems to beliL the spirit of its hero. It 
should be noted that Lowell's polysyllables — and 
few writers have more — do not weigh down the page ; 
they are accelerative, galloping, even charging, in leap 
on leap, from section to section. His word-coining is Caprice. 
less venial, for he does not lack taste, and at times 
exercises it rigidly. But his luimor, learning, and ca- 
price audaciously put it by, with a "Go thy way till 
I need thee!" His comments on Spenser's innova- 
tions should be self-applied, and especially the words 
culled from Bellay, who bids his poet " Fear not to 
innovate somewhat . . . with modesty, however, with 
analogy, and judgment of ear." His linguistic ar- 
senal serves him well : nor does he fail of fine exor- 
diums and perorations, and sentences whose "beauty 
and majesty," as he says of Spenser's, he refuses to 
endanger by " experiments of this kind." But we 
should miss something if we held him to his own for- 
mula of the best writing, that in which the " compo- 
nent parts " of English " are most exquisitely propor- 
tioned one to the other." 

Authors who do lay-work for a living, and pursue Thorough 
their art in hours which are the breathing-time of ''^'"^' 
other men, are permitted few of the common pleas- 
ures for wdiich they needs must crave. Their manu- 
scripts are written in their blood, and the ink grows 
pale apace. Even the delight of reading, that at 
once stimulates and draws upon the brain, is forbid- 
den to one who is harnessed in the van of a profes- 
sional career. But Lowell, I suspect, has been shy of 
any harness from which he could not bolt at will. 
His book-feeding has been unstinted, omnivorous : he 
was born among books, reared upoi\ them, and has 
taken from them that which enriches him vet leaves 



vietU. 



332 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 



Lowell 
and Poe. 



Theory of 
tratisla- 
tion. See 
f. 209. 



Point a7id 
tuisdom. 



them none the poorer. Of all writing-men, he who 
can read without stint is to be envied. Take the 
essay on Chaucer ; it is the result of perfect equip- 
ment for a literary task. It is a spring-time brew of 
philological comment and poetic induction : it reeks 
with fact, flavored by originality. Here is a rare elu- 
cidation of both the letter and the spirit of Chaucer's 
song ; no mere scholar could so illumine the process, 
and no poet who was not a scholar would venture 
upon it. Lowell is the contratype of Poe, who made a 
flourish of scholarship, and was sure of little for which 
he did not cram. Poe's humor, moreover, was a heavy 
lance, awkwardly and maliciously couched ; Lowell 
holds his weapon with grace and courtesy, and has a 
sword of wit in reserve, should affairs grow serious. 
His faculty of scholarly assimilation and reproduction 
resembles Montaigne's. What he thoroughly enjoys 
is work like his review of the " Library of Old Au- 
thors." This paper opens with a talk upon books, 
pleasant as Lamb's gossip and with latter-day thought 
and criticism beneath the winning style ; then follow 
swift but searching etymological tests of early authors 
and modern editors, from which the latter come out 
with some loss of lustre. Lowell's idea of translation 
is free reproduction by a man of genius. He values 
Chapman, and declares that Keats, of all men, was 
the one to have translated Homer. One would like 
to see a translation from his own hand, say of Aris- 
tophanes : should the text halt, the commentary alone 
would repay us, and the freest versions by Lowell 
might be something " more original than his originals." 
His wit inclines him to condense professional truths 
in expressions that stick in the memory. The mono- 
graph on Spenser sparkles with clever, pointed say- 
ings : " Chaucer had been in his grave one hundreci 



POIXTED SA VrXGS. 



333 



and fifty years ere England had secreted choice ma- 
terial enough for the making of another great poet." 
Of ancient poetasters, it cannot be said " that their 
works have perished because they were written in an 
obsolete dialect ; for it is the poem that keeps the 
language alive, and not the language that buoys up 
the poem." ..." The complaints one sometimes 
hears of the neglect of our older literature are the 
regrets of archaeologists rather than of critics. One 
does not need to advertise the squirrels " (this sen- 
tence is like Landor) " where the nut-trees are, nor 
could any amount of lecturing persuade them to spend 
their teeth on a hollow nut." ..." Any verse that 
makes you and me foreigners is not only not great 
poetry, but no poetry at all." Speaking of Dunbar's 
works, "Whoso is national enough to like thistles 
may browse there to his heart's content. I am in- 
clined for other pasture, having long ago satisfied 
myself by a good deal of dogged reading that every 
generation is sure of its own share of bores without 
borrowing from the past." And in " Witchcraft '* he 
says that Sidney '' seems to have divined the fact that 
there is but one kind of English that is always appro- 
priate and never obsolete, namely, the very best." 
With all this point and wisdom, he often cannot 
refrain from unleashing conceits that fly without 
" stamping " their imagery. In a single page he com- 
pares Chaucer's style to a river and a precious vin- 
tage, and contrasts it with the froth of champagne and 
the folly of Milo. In relation to Shakespeare's birth, 
we have astrology, vinous processes, and alembic pro- 
jection, following upon one another as illustrations of 
die coming nativity. Afterward, while censuring lan- 
guage that is " literar}^, so that there is a gap be- 
tween the speech of books and that of life," Lowell 



A httndant 
conceits. 



334 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 



Imagery^ 



A sure and 

indepen- 
dent critic. 



tells us that " a mind in itself essentially original be- 
comes in the use of such a medium of utterance un- 
consciously reminiscential and reflective, lunar and not 
solar, in expression and even in thought ! " Passages 
of this sort not unnaturally move other critics, in 
their turn, to fling a de te fabiila at the writer. An 
author, in truth, " should consider how largely the art 
of writing consists in knowing what to leave in the 
inkstand." But Mr. Lowell is not unconscious of 
these things : he toys with licenses, as if to prove 
that, next to Chapman, " he has the longest wind 
. . . without being long-winded," of all authors. Nor 
have we any writer whose imagery is oftener strong 
and exquisite : as in the description of a snowy winter 
landscape, or at the close of his " Milton," or where, 
in " Spenser," he glorifies the handiwork of " the witch, 
Imagination," 

Lowell's scrutiny is sure, and his tests are apt and 
instant. He is a detective to be dreaded by preten- 
ders. He wastes no reverence upon traditional errors, 
but no man is more impatient of sham-reform, less 
afraid of odia., whether theological, scientific, or es- 
thetic. As a comparative critic, there are few so well 
served by memory and reading. In the essay on 
Milton he treats with novel discrimination the respec- 
tive modes of Shakespeare, Milton, and Tasso. Writ- 
ing of Wordsworth, Swinburne, and others, he uses 
the comparative method to good purpose. No one is 
a better judge of what is original. Most things have 
been said more than once, and he knows by whomo 
His standard is the manner of saying. " In the par= 
liament of the present," he declares, " every man rep- 
resents a constituency of the past " ; and again, 
" Writers who have no past are pretty sure of having 
no future " : and " It is the man behind the words 



AS A CRITIC. 



335 



that giv^es them vakie." He names Chaucer, Shake- 
speare, Dryden, in evidence of the truth that " It is 
not the finding of a thing, but the making something 
of it after it is found, that is of consequence." In his 
paper on Wordsworth, he draws a distinction between 
originaUty and eccentricity which, I fear, will not soon 
become obsolete for want of cases in illustration. 
Striking points are frequent in his critical prose. It 
is Lowell who says, of Shakespeare, that the manner 
of a first-class poet is incommunicable, and therefore 
he never can found a school. His essay on Carlyle, 
undertaken at a time when few ventured to dispute 
the old Norseman's autocracy, is, on the whole, as 
just as it is independent ; that on Lincoln could only 
have been written by one whose convictions rendered 
him prophetic. Lowell's analogical gift is seen in his 
comparison of Lincoln to Henry IV. — made before 
the President's assassination had completed the par- 
allel. His declaration, in " Spenser," of the qualities 
of voice that " define a man as a poet," is not to be 
gainsaid, and he also gives us a clever test of the 
worth of allegory, — it must be that which the reader 
" helps to make out of his own experience." It is 
true that his verdicts are not always such as we agree 
with, nor do they always agree among themselves. 
Being a poet, he is prone to express his immediate 
feeling without submitting it to the principles that, in 
fact, govern his final judgment. This imparts life to 
a writer, but subjects him to the charge of inconsis- 
tency, especially if it is not his habit to revise past 
work. Lowell scarcely does justice to Wordsworth's 
imagination, though keenly alive to the bard's pueril- 
ities and want of humor. His essay on Dryden, as a 
presentation of the man and poet, is the best of its 
length, and contains some of the writer's finest apo- 



Impulsei. 



336 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 



Structural 

hnagina- 

tion. 



thegms ; that on Pope is inferior, — the critic being 
so out of personal liking for the figure-head of his 
youth as to treat him not without fairness and dis- 
crimination, but, I think, inadequately. He possibly 
overrates Clough, as a signal representative of modern 
feeling, yet may be forgiven for this, as he knew and 
loved him, and was joined with him in the freema- 
sonry of comrades and poets. He has touched very 
lightly, once and again, on Emerson, but with precision 
and truth. His analysis of Thoreau is sharply criti- 
cised as being narrow, but it did expose the defective 
side of a unique character, and, all things considered, 
is the subtlest of his minor reviews. 

Lowell rightly holds the highest imagination to be, 
not so much that which "gathers into the intense 
focus of passionate phrase," as " the faculty that 
shapes and gives unity of design and balanced grav- 
itation of parts." His work, as we have seen, at 
times displays the former kind, rather than the latter. 
It is in dwelling on special traits, with praise or cen- 
sure, that he seems discursive. Thus, while his 
"Shakespeare Once More" includes a masterly expo- 
sition of the dramatist's style, it is fragmentary — 
even more than need be — in the special touches that 
follow. Other papers fall short in construction ; they 
are not sustained upon the scales indicated at com- 
mencement. This lack of balance, I am sure, is due 
quite as much to circumstances as to the critic's tem- 
perament, and largely to the limits of the periodicals 
for which he has written. His mind seizes upon a 
great theme, in mass and in detail, and he begins as 
if to cover it thoroughly. " Lessing " opens with a 
broad view of the German intellect and literature ; 
" Chaucer " with a survey of the Troubadour period ; 
and the analogous introductions to Spenser, Dryden, 



LITERARY WEALTH AND FREEDOM. 



337 



Pope, are of the utmost value. But to complete an 
essay upon this plan a book must be written. We 
are none the less grateful for Lowell's noble vesti- 
bules, even though we find them too large for the 
structures. Surplusage is a royal fault. We see that 
he can be an artist at will, though constantly setting 
the law of his nature above all laws. Some of the 
greater essays are both various and complete. That 
upon Dante is a superb example ; one need not be a 
Dantean scholar to comprehend the scope and strength 
of this prolonged, cumulative, coherent analysis of the 
Florentine's career — fortified by citations, and en- 
riched with a knowledge of Italian history, literature, 
atmosphere, at the close of the thirteenth century, 
such as few living men possess. 

Have I not indicated that the unfailing value of 
Lowell's prose work consists in freedom and variety 
that are the true reflex of the man himself ? His 
resources make him prodigal, and he has the brave 
impatience of a skilled performer who trusts his ear 
and is none too careful of the written score. We 
seem to have his first notes, and find them better 
than the revised drafts of other men. It is a fellow- 
feeling which leads him to say of Dryden, that "one 
of the charms of his best writing is that everything 
seems struck off at a heat, as by a superior man in 
the best mood of his talk." This transfer of his own 
nature is delightful. He will be free, and his cen- 
sers should rate his freedom at its worth, and not 
hold him too rigidly to conventionalities which he 
understands, yet chooses to forego. Even the ar- 
rangement of his essays seems to be a chance one, 
but there is an art in the chance. He has given us 
a series of literary monographs in which Americans 
may take just pride, for his genius has imparted new 

22 



Copious' 

ft£SS. 



Essential 
value of 
his prose 
work. 



338 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 



» Under 
the Wil- 
lows, and 
other 
Poems, ''^ 
1868. 



light and freshness to' the greatest themes. To these 
he might add equally notable studies of Cervantes, 
Moliere, and Goethe. No living man could venture 
with less presumption to summon up once more the 
spirits of those masters. But already the wealth of 
his critical product is surprising. I think that a se- 
lection of apothegms and maxims could be made 
from it, which, for original thoughts and wise teach- 
ing of the author's art, would be worth more to the 
literary neophyte, and afford raore satisfaction to vet- 
eran readers, than a digest of the English prose of 
any other writer since Landor in his prime. 

V. 

Lowell's prose diversions, so wide in range, could 
not have been made without some lapse of fealty to 
the muse of song. When, in 1868, the volume U?ider 
the Willows appeared, a note stated that the poems 
mostly had been written at intervals during many 
years. There is, none the less, an air of afternoon 
about them. They are the songs of a man who in 
truth has gelebt und geliebet — to revive the motto of 
his juvenile book — and who has lived to love again. 
Their thought is subtler, their subjectivity that of one 
who reads the hearts of others in his own. The 
title -piece is a most refreshing stretch of pastoral 
verse. Here and elsewhere his sympathy with birds 
and trees continues, and much resembles Lander's : -* 

"But I in June am midway to believe 
A tree among my far progenitors, 

And I have many a life-long leafy friend, 
Never estranged nor careful of my soul. 
That knows I hate the axe." 



LATER POEMS. 



339 



The close recalls the feeling of the "Thalysia" of 
Theocritus, yet escapes the parallel displayed in cer- 
tain idyls of Tennyson. The opening gives us a 
finer rhapsody of June, though less apt to catch the 
popular ear, than the one in '' Sir Launfal." No 
common musician can touch so variously a well-worn 
theme. 

I do not read these later poems without remem- 
bering the moods to which Arthur Clough was sub- 
ject, and which also affect the verse of another with 
whom his too brief life was associated. " Auf Wie- 
dersehen " and its " Palinode " — delicate, brooding, 
dithyrambic — might seem the work of either Clough 
or Matthew Arnold, and "A Mood" and "The Foun- 
tain of Youth " are quite in sympathy with that of 
the last-named poet. Arnold, like Lowell, delights 
in "accidentals" and in haunting measures, often ad- 
mirably rendered. But I think few of his lines are 
both so suggestive and so vibratory as these from 
Lowell's exquisite fantasy, " In the Twilight " : — 

" Sometimes a breath floats by me, 
An odor from Dreamland sent, 
That makes the ghost seem nigh me 
Of a splendor that came and went, 
Of a life lived somewhere, I know not 

In what diviner sphere, 
Of memories that stay not and go not, 
Like music once heard by an ear 
That cannot forget or reclaim it, — 
A something so shy, it would shame it 

To make it a show, 
A something too vague, could I name it, 

For others to know. 
As if I had lived it or dreamed it, 
As if I had acted or schemed it, 
Long ago ! 



Lowell, 
Clough, 
and Alat- 
tJiev) Ar 
nold. Cp. 
''Victor 
ria->i Po- 
ets " ; //. 

243) 244» 
afid pp. 

95-99- 



340 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, 



" And yet, could I live it over. 
This life that stirs in my brain, 
Could I be both maiden and lover. 
Moon and tide, bee and clover. 

As I seem to have been, once again, 
Could I but speak and show it, 

This pleasure, more sharp than pain. 
That baffles and lures me so. 
The world should not lack a poet. 
Such as it had 
In the ages glad 

Long ago ! " 

Between verse like this, and that of Mr. Hosea Big- 
low, each definite in flavor, the range is phenomenal. 
To extend a comparison made for the sole purpose 
of illustrating Lowell's bent, I will say that in a for- 
mer review I extolled the beauty of Arnold's objecv 
tive verse — a kind to which his early preface would 
restrict the modern poet. But with reference to his 
occasional hardness of touch, and to the mental con- 
flicts revealed by Clough and himself, I scarcely did 
full justice to a suggestive class of his poems, in a 
form peculiarly his own, — poems which grow upon 
the reader and stand the test of years, — and of 
these I will name, as good examples, " The Buried 
Life" and "A Summer Night." Lowell and Arnold, 
poets nearly equal in years, both scholars, both orig- 
inal thinkers, occupy representative positions, — the 
one in the Old England and the other in the New, — 
which are singularly correspondent. Two things, how- 
ever, are to be noted. The American has the freer 
hand and wider range as a poet. Humor, dialect- 
verse, and familiar epistles come from him as nat- 
urally as his stateliest odes. Again, while both poets 
feel the perplexities of the time, Arnold's difficulties 
are the more restrictive of his poetic glow ; with him 



Lowell 
and A r- 

nold. 



LOWELL AXD ARNOLD. 



341 



the iinpcdinicnis are spiritual, with Lowell they are 
material and to be overcome. Mr. Lowell at times 
has found himself restricted by our local conditions 
set forth in my early chapters. Like Mr. Arnold, he 
also feels the questioning spirit of our age of unrest ; 
but his nature is too various and healthy to be de- 
pressed by it. The cloud rests more durably on Ar- 
nold. Lowell always has one refuge, — to which, also, 
the poet of the Highland " Bothie " did not resort in 
vain. Give him a touch of Mother Earth, a breath 
of free air, one flash of sunshine, and he is no longer 
a book-man and a brooder ; his blood runs riot with 
the Spring ; this inborn, poetic elasticity is the best 
gift of the gods. Faith and joy are the ascensive 
forces of song. Lowell trusts in Nature and she 
gladdens him. How free and unjaded the spirit of 
"Al Fresco," and of the sprayey " Pictures from Ap- 
pledore ! " At times he places you 

" So nigh to the . . . heart of God, 
You almost seem to feel it beat 
Down from the sunshine and up from the sod." 

Men are no less near to him. Like Thoreau, — who 
knew the world having " travelled " many years in 
Concord, — he believes that 

" Whatever moulds of various brain 
E'er shaped the world to weal or woe, 
Whatever empires wax and wane, 
To him that hath not eyes in vain 
Our village-microcosm can show." 

His rustics act and speak for themselves. Some of 
his lyrics are as dramatic, in their wa}', as those of 
Browning, — a poet whose erratic temper, also, is not 
unlike his own. 

It is worth the consideration of those who deplore 
the effect of "over-culture" upon our poets, that the 



In 

sympathy 

with 

Nature^ 



and with 
vieii. 



342 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 



The ques- 
tiou of cul- 
Uire. Cp. 
" Victo- 
rian 
Poets " : 
^. 120. 



" The Ca- 
thedral;'' 
1870. 



■Styte 



verse of Lowell and Emerson seems the product of 
their instant moods. The highest culture has learned 
to unlearn, and Lowell, when he wrote " A Winter 
Hymn to my Fire," had surely reached its freehold. 
A masterly, unstinted improvisation — the freshness 
of youth, with the off-hand ease of an accomplished 
v/orkman — the mellow thought and rich imagination 
of a poet in his prime. Lowell's culture has not bred 
in him an undue respect for polish, and for estab- 
lished ways and forms. Precisely the opposite. Much 
learning and a fertile mind incline him to express mi- 
nute shades of his fancy by a most iconoclastic use of 
words and prefixes. This trait lessened the dignity 
of his blank-verse poem. The Cathedral, admired for its 
noble passages and justly censured for things that jar 
and seem out of place. It is not so much a stately 
pile, conforming to itself, that has risen " like an ex- 
halation," as a structure builded part by part, and at 
different periods of grandeur or grotesqueness. Con- 
trast the imposing finale — the dome of the edifice — 
with the whimsical by-play of the tourists airing their 
French. A sensitive reader, himself a poet and critic, 
not long ago said to me that he never could wholly 
forgive Mr. Lowell for using the word " undispriva- 
cied " in this elevated poem. But I do not know in 
what other production the changeful thoughts of a 
mind swiftly considering the most complex modern 
problems, are caught so naturally, and as if on the 
instant by some psychographic process. " A Fa- 
miliar Epistle," without the extreme finish of Dobson's 
work, adds no less to the raciness of Swift or Gay 
a poet's blood and fire. It has been said that Low- 
ell's verse and prose are marked by a manner, rather 
than by style, in the modern sense, — which latter I 
take to be an airy, elusive perfection of language 



'COMMEMORATION ODE? 



343 



and syntax, that of itself wins the reader, and upon 
which writers of a new school have built up reputa- 
tions. The thought, the purpose, — these are the 
main ends with Lowell, though prose or metre suffer 
for it, and there is no doubt that his manner ex- 
actly repeats his habit of mind ; and so in this case, 
as ever, the style is again the man. My own ex- 
planation of things which annoy us in his loftier 
pieces is that his every-day genius is that of wit 
and humor. His familiar and satiric writings are 
consistent works of art. It is upon his serious and 
exalted moods that these things seem to intrude, like 
the whisperings of the Black Man in the ears of a 
Puritan at prayers. 

Where he has bravely exorcised his annoy er is in 
the lyric efforts that hold a pcet responsible, not only 
to himself, but also to the needs of great occasions. 
In these there is nothing erratic or perverse. The 
handiwork is unequal, but not seldom the vigorous 
intellect and throbbing heart of the man lift him to 
the airiest heights of a nation's song. I refer, of 
course, to his odes, delivered since the close of our 
civil war. 

Of these the first, and strongest, is the Ode Recited 
at the Harvard Commeinoratioii. The poet was fresh 
from the woes and exaltations of the war. He had 
an occasion that comes but once in a lifetime. The 
day, the place, the memories of inexorable events, 
his heart wTung with its own losses and sharing the 
proud grief of his Alma Mater, — these all united 
to call forth Mr. Lowell's highest powe s. Another 
poet would have composed a less unequal ode \ no 
American could have glorified it with braver pas- 
sages, with whiter heat, with language and imagery 
so befitting impassioned thought. Tried by the rule 



Rationale 
of LowclPi 
man7ier. 



TJu^'Cottu 
me mar a- 
tion Ode^" 
1865. 



344 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 



« Three 
Tyiemorial 
foeffis,'''' 
187s, 1876. 



that a true poet is at his best with the greatest theme, 
Lowell's strength is indisputable. The ode is no 
smooth-cut block from Pentelicus, but a mass of 
rugged quartZj beautified with prismatic crystals, and 
deep-veined here and there with virgin gold. The 
early strophes, though opening with a fine abrupt line^ 
" Weak - winged is song," are scarcely firm and in- 
cisive. Lowell had to work up to his theme. In the 
third division, " Many loved Truth, and lavished life's 
best oil," he struck upon a new and musical intona- 
tion of the tenderest thoughts. The quaver of this 
melodious interlude carries the ode along, until the 
great strophe is reached, — ■ 

" Such was he, our Martyr-Chief," 

in which the man, Abraham Lincoln, whose death 
had but just closed the national tragedy, is delineated 
in a manner that gives this poet a preeminence, among 
those who capture likeness in enduring verse, that we 
award to Velasquez among those who fasten it upon 
the canvas. " One of Plutarch's men " is before us, 
face to face : an historic character whom Lowell fully 
comprehended, and to whose height he reached in this 
great strophe. Scarcely less fine is his tearful, yet 
transfiguring, Avete to the sacred dead of the Com- 
memoration. The Vv^eaker divisions of the produc- 
tion furnish a background to these passages, and at 
the close the poet rises with the invocation, — 

" Bow down, dear Land, for thou hast found release ! " 

— a strain which shows that when Lowell determinedly 
sets his mouth to the trumpet, the blast is that of 
Roncesvalles. Three other heroic odes were com- 
posed, it is just to repeat, " after he had precluded 
himself," by the Harvard poem, "from many of the 



' THREE MEMORIAL POEMS? 



345 



natural outlets of thought and feeling." That upon 
Washington, delivered " Under the Old Elm," is the 
longest and most imposing. Despite its form, it is 
too long for an ode, and Mr. Lowell has more fitly 
entitled it a poem. The characterization of Wash- 
ington is less bold and sympathetic than that of Lin- 
coln. Better the superb tribute to the Mother of 
Presidents, — 

** Virginia gave us this imperial man," 

which ends the poem with forty unbroken lines that 
again bring us to the height of Lowell's powder. The 
closing strophes of the Centennial Ode — " Plawless 
his hand," and " They steered by stars the elder 
shipmen knew " — are quite as notable. Underwood 
has called the three odes an Alpine group, — yet 
each in its length and unevenness brings to mind a 
Rocky Mountain chain, in which snow-clad, sunlit 
peaks arise, connected by vaguely outlined ridges of 
the Sierra. 

In a passage of the last-named ode there is food 
for thought between the lines : — 

" Poets, as their heads grow gray. 
Look from too far behind the eyes, 
Too long-experienced to be wise 
In guileless youth's diviner way; 
Life sings not now, but prophesies." 

But the second-sight of age has been always, I have 
said, a portion of Lowell's strength and disability. 
One thing, perhaps, is needed to make his career 
ideal : some adequate theme, and mode of treatment, 
for a work of pure poetry, that shall be, through its 
imaginative beauty, the rival and complemerit of his 
serio-comic masterpiece. " Fitz-Adam's Story," a por- 
tion of the long-projected " Nooning," indicates one 



The Uft- 
JinisJied 
Window.^ 



346 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, 



Recapitu- 
lation' 



direction in which he has felt his way ; but he has 
not followed up the clew v;ith the unhasting. unresting 
purpose that distinguished Longfellow. Even now, and 
after his more heroic flights, it might be a diversion 
to his later years, and certainly would revive an in- 
terest in American verse, if he would go back and 
complete "The Nooning," making it, as he can, the 
most charming of New England's idyllic poems. 



VI. 



Lowell, then, is a poet who seems to represent 
New England more variously than either of his com- 
rades. We find in his work, as in theirs, her loyalty 
and moral purpose. She has been at cost for his 
training, and he, in turn, has read her heart, honor- 
ing her as a mother before the world, and seeing 
beauty in her common garb and speech. To him, 
the Eastern States are what the fathers, as he has 
said, desired to found, —-no New Jerusalem, but a 
new England, and, if it might be, a better one. His 
poetry has the strength, the tenderness, and the de- 
fects of the down-East temper. His doctrines and 
reflections, in the midst of an ethereal distillation, at 
times act like the single drop of prose which, as he 
reports a saying of Landor to Wordsworth, precipi- 
tates the whole. But again he is all poet, and the 
blithest, most unstudied songster on the old Bay 
Shore. He is, just as truly, an American of the Amer- 
icans, alive to the idea and movement of the whole 
country, singularly independent in his tests of its men 
and products —from whatever section, or in however 
unpromising form, they chance to appear. Many have 
found him the surest to detect and welcome, at the 



HIS GEAIUS A AD KECiU^P. 



347 



time when welcome was needed and lesser men held 
back, what there mi<iht be in them of worth. He is 
an artist who recognizes things outside of art, and 
would not rate the knack of writing lines to a lady's 
girdle above all other wonders of the age. In default 
of the motive for a sustained and purely ideal work, 
he has awaited the visits of the Muse, and acted on 
the moment at her bidding ; none of our poets, in- 
deed, has so thrown the responsibility on a monitor 
whom no industry can placate, who is deaf to en- 
treatv, but o'ives without stint at her own will. He 
will sing when she bids him, or not at all. But this 
is in the nature of genius, and thus brings me to a 
conclusion. The world readily perceives the genius 
that is set off by an eccentric or turbid life. Taking 
advantage of this, false Amphitryons often vaunt them- 
selves for a while. But let a true poet be born to 
culture and position, and have a share of things which 
constitute good fortune, and his rarer gift has no ro- 
mantic aid to bring it into notice : its recognition 
comes solely through its product, and not fully until 
" after some time be past." And if Lowell be not, 
first of all, an original genius, I know not where to 
look for one. Judged by his personal bearing, who is 
brighter, more persuasive, more equal to the occasion 
and himself, — less open to Doudan's stricture upon 
w^riters who hoard and store up their thoughts for the 
betterment of their printed works? Lowell's treasury 
can stand the drafts of both speech and composition. 
Judged by his works, as a poet in the end must be, he 
is one who might gain by revision and compression. 
But think, as is his due, upon the high-water marks of 
his abundant tide, and see how enviable the record of 
a poet who is our most brilliant and learned critic, and 
who has given us our best native id}-l, our best and 



A poet of 
I origifial 
I ge7iius> 



348 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 



most complete work in dialectic verse, and the noblest 
heroic ode that America has produced, — each and all 
ranking with the first of their kinds in English litera-* 
ture of the modern time. 



CHAPTER X. 



WALT WHITMAN. 



I. 

OF things counted clear to a minstrel's heart, and 
which can mal<e him patiently endure the com- 
mon ills of life, this poet has secured a bounteous 
share. No one more conspicuously shines by differ- 
ence. Others are more widely read, but who else has 
been so widely talked of, and who has held even a 
few readers with so absolute a sway .'* Whatever we 
may think of his chantings, the time has gone by 
when it was possible to ignore him ; whatever his 
ground may be, he has set his feet squarely and 
audaciously upon it, and is no light weight. En- 
deavor, then, to judge him on his merits, for he will 
and must be judged. He stands in the roadway, with 
his Saint au Mo7ide : — 

" Toward all 
I raise high the perpendicular hand, — I make the signal, 
To remain after me in sight forever, 
For all the haunts and homes of men." 

There are not wanting those who return his saluta- 
tion. He is in very good society, and has been so for 
a long while. At the outset he was favored with the 
hand of Emerson, and, once acknowledged at court, 
allies quickly flocked around him. No writer holds, 
in some respects, a more enviable place than burly 
Walt Whitman. As for pub.Uc opinion of the profes- 



IValter 

IVkitinafU 

bont in 

West 

Hills, 

Loftg 

Island, 

May 31, 

1819. 



A chal' 
lenger. 



350 



WALT WHITMAN. 



Publicity 
nt home 
vnd 
abroad. 



Incidental 
fuccesses. 



A difficult 
pjet to esti- 
mate. 



The debate 
concerning' 
Vint. 



sional kind, no American poet, save Longfellow, has 
attracted so much notice as he in England, France, 
Germany, and I know not what other lands. ' Personal 
items of his doings, sayings, and appearance constantly 
have found their way to the public. In a collection 
of sketches, articles, debates, which have appeared 
during the last fifteen years, relating to American 
poets, the Whitman and Poe packages, before the 
deaths of Emerson and Longfellow, were each much 
larger than all the rest combined. Curiously enough, 
three fourths of the articles upon Whitman are written 
by friends who assert that he is neglected by the 
press. Not only in that publicity which is akin to 
fame, and stimulating to the poet, has he been thus 
fortunate i but also in the faculty of exciting and sus- 
taining a discussion in which he has been forced to 
take little part himself; in an aptitude for making 
disciples of men able to gain the general ear, and 
vying with one another to stay up his hands ; in his 
unencumbered, easy way of life ; finally, in a bodily 
and mental equipment, and a tact or artistic instinct 
to make the most of it, that have established a vigor- 
ous ideal of himself as a bard and seer. These inci- 
dental successes, which of course do not confirm nor 
conflict with an estimate of his genius, are brought to 
mind as the features of a singular career. 

Such a poet must find a place in any review of 
the course of American song. Otherwise, however 
observant of his work from the beginning, I well 
might hesitate to express my own judgment of thoughts 
and modes which, like questions in philology or med- 
icine, seem to provoke contention in which men act 
very much like children and little to the advantage of 
all concerned. The disputants who arise when an 
innovator comes along never were divided more 



A FAIR MODE OF CRITICISM. 



351 



sharply, — not e\-cn in ihat classico-romantic conflict 
which would have made the fortune of a lesser poet 
than the author of '' Hernani." Perhaps it would be 
found, upon examination, that the class which declines 
to regard Whitman as a hero and poet has been con- 
tent with saying very little about him. If his disciples 
are in a minority, it is they who chiefly have written 
the contents of the package mentioned, who never 
lose a point, who have filled the air with his name. 
Our acceptance of their estimate almost has seemed 
the condition of their intellectual respect. _At times 
we are constrained to infer that this poet is to be 
canonized, not criticised, — that he, they and others 
may say to Emerson, Lowell, Tennyson, "Thou ailest 
here, and here " ; but woe unto them that lay hands 
on the Ark of the Covenant. Two points belong to 
my own mode of inquiry : How far does the effort of a 
workman relate to what is fine and enduring .? and, 
how far does he succeed in his effort ? Nor can I 
pay Mr. Whitman any w^orthier tribute than to ex- 
amine fairly his credentials, and to test his work by 
the canons, so far as we discover them, that underlie 
the best results of every progressive art. I recall his 
own comment on Emerson : " As I understand him, 
the truest honor you can pay him is to try his ow^n 
rules." If his poetry is founded in the simplicity and 
universality which are claimed for it, and which dis- 
tinguish great works, the average man, who reads 
Shakespeare and the English Bible, ought to catch 
glimpses of its scope and meaning,] and therefore I 
am guilty of no strange temerity in forming some 
opinion of these matters. 

On the other hand, if there be any so impatient 
of his assumptions, or so tired of the manifestoes of 
his friends, as to refuse him the consideration they 



Points and 
method 0/ 
inquiry. 



Fair play, 



352 



WALT WHITMAN. 



A rotnan- 
tlc and sig- 
nificant 
bearing. 



The 

personal 

equation. 



would extend to any man alive, against such also I 
would protest, and deem them neither just nor wise. 
Their course would give weight to the charge that in 
America Whitman has been subjected to a kind of 
outlawry. And those most doubtful of his methods, 
beliefs, inspiration, should understand that here is an 
uncommon and striking figure, which they will do 
well to observe ; one whose words have taken hold 
in various quarters, and whose works should be stud- 
ied as a whole before they are condemned. Not only 
a poet, but a personage, of a bearing conformed to 
his ideal. Whether this bearing comes by nature 
only, or through skilful intent, its possessor certainly 
carries it bravely, and, as the phrase is, fills the bill, 
— a task in which some who have tried to emulate 
him have disastrously failed. Not only a poet and 
personage, but one whose views and declarations are 
also worth attention. True, our main business is not 
so much to test the soundness of his theories as to 
ask how poetically he has announced them. We are 
examining the poets, not the sages and heroes, except 
in so far as wisdom and heroism must belong to 
poetry. But Whitman is the most subjective poet on 
record. The many who look upon art solely as a 
means of expression justly will not be content unless 
the man is included in the problem. I, who believe 
that he who uses song as his means of expression is 
on one side an artist, wish to consider him both as 
an artist and a man. 

Questions involving the nature of verse, of ex- 
pression, of the poetic life, cannot be adequately dis- 
cussed in a single chapter; but a paragraph, at least, 
may be devoted to each point, and should be given 
its full weight of meaning. It is the fashion for 
many who reject Whitman's canticles to say : " His 



HIS LIFE AND HIS SONG. 



353 



poetry is good for nothing ; but we like him as a 
man," etc. To me, it seems that his song is more 
noteworthy than his hfe, in spite of his services in 
the hospitals during our civil war. His life, at its 
best periods, was an emblem of the nobleness of a 
multitude of his country-men and country-women ; at 
other times, doubtless, and as his poem of " Brook- 
lyn Ferry '' permits us to surmise, it has been no more 
self-forgetting than the lives of countless obscure toil- 
ers who do their best from day to day. If, then, I 
do not think his heroism so important as his art, nor 
admire him chiefly as an annunciator, but as a poet, 
it is because I know more than one village where 
each workman is a philosopher in his way, and some- 
thing of a priest, and because poets are rarer among 
us than preachers and heroes, — and I wish to take 
him at his rarest. That there may be no doubt, from 
page to page (amid the seeming inconsistencies that 
must characterize a study of Whitman), as to my 
conclusion on this point, I may as well say now that 
both instinct and judgment, with our Greek choruses 
in mind, and Pindar, and the Hebrew bards, long 
since led me to number him among the foremost lyric 
and idyllic poets. If any fail to perceive what I mean 
by this, let him take a single poem, composed in 
Whitman's finer mood, — " Out of the Cradle End- 
lessly Rocking," — and read it with some care. Had 
he not chanted like this, the exorbitant world would 
hear little of his philosophy and consecration, and 
care for them still less. Yet it is no less plain to 
me, reading long and often his early volume, — " start- 
ing from Paumanok " with this full-throated poet, 
— that many years ago he formed an inspired and 
inspiring conception of the spirit and destiny of his 
own land, his own people, and of the future of a 
23 



Whit- 
inatt's li/e 
not so ex- 
ceptional 
as his 
works. 



Without 
doubt a 
poet of 
lyric and 
idyllic 
genius. 



354 



WALT WHITMAN. 



^''Leaves of 
Grass " ; 
Brooklyn^ 
N. v., 
1855. 



Reviewed 
in " Put- 
nam's 
Monthly 
Maga- 
zine. "^^ 



world guided by the example of our continental De- 
mocracy ; and that, — whatever his personal ambi- 
tion, motive, strength, or weakness, — he bravely and 
with true genius set forth this conception by methods 
as bold and free as that which they expressed. 
What that conception was is to be discovered most 
readily in the poems which embody it, and not in one 
but in the mass of them from that day to this. He 
singularly fails to convey it with justice to himself in 
the rhetorical preface to the second volume of his 
Centennial edition. 



II. 

The first edition of Leaves of Grass^ now so val- 
ued by collectors, is a long, thin volume, curious to 
behold, with wide pages that give the author's pecul- 
iar lines their full effect. Here was a man with meas- 
ureless " bounce " and ambition, but with a coequal 
range of demands for his country, and professedly 
for all mankind. At that time the sale of most books 
of poetry or abstract thought was small enough ; 
critical authorities were few, and of little weight. 
" Putnam's Monthly " certainly had influence, and 
was the periodical to which our favorite writers con- 
tributed some of their choicest work. Its reviewer 
gave the strange book the best reception possible, 
by filling three columns with extracts from its pages. 
He could not have selected any passages more orig- 
inal than those beginning with the lines, " I play not 
a march for victors only," and " A child said. What 
is the grass ? " — than the death-scene of the mashed 
fireman, for whose sake is the pervading hush among 
the kneeling crowd, — the ringing story of the old- 
fashioned frigate and the little captain who won by 



'LEAVES OF grass: 



'55 



the light of tlie moon and stars, — the proud humil- 
ity, the righteous irony and wrath of " A Slave at 
Auction " and "A Woman at Auction," — the He- 
braic picture of the Quakeress with face clearer and 
more beautiful than the sky, "the justified mother 
of men." These, and a few masterly bits of descrip- 
tion and apostrophe^ were given in a manner just to 
the poet, w^hile rude and coarser parts, that might 
displease even a progressive reader, were kindly over- 
looked. The study of Emerson and Carlyle had bred 
a tolerance of whatever was true to nature and op- 
posed to sham. " Leaves of Grass " was a legitimate 
offspring of the new movement. Howsoever differing 
from the latter, or going beyond it, the book would 
not have found life had not the Concord school al- 
ready made for it an atmosphere. Whitman — a man 
of the people — applied the down-East philosophy to 
the daily walks of life, and sang the blare and brawn 
that he found in the streets about him. In his open- 
ing lines: — 

'* I celebrate myself ; 
And what I assume you shall assume ; 
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. 



"I loafe and invite my soul ; 
I lean and loafe at my ease 
summer grass," 



observing a spear of 



he simply took Alcott and Emerson at their word. 
His radical demonstration, extended in later years 
even to rebuke of their own failure to go farther, 
brought them, perchance, like Frankenstein, to re- 
gard with little complacence the strides of their prod- 
igy. The difference between Emerson and Whitman Massachw 
illustrated that between certain modes of advanced ''^^' ^/- 
thought in Massachusetts and New York. If thai 



The iran- 
sce>idc7ital 
inoveineiit. 



356 



WALT WHITMAN. 



Class 
feeling. 



Fir si i-m- 
fressiojis 
of this 
poetry. 



philosophy of the former professed to include the peo- 
ple, in its genesis and application it often was some- 
what provincial and aristocratic ; the other also was 
theoretically broad, professing to include the schol- 
arly and refined, but in spirit was no less provincial, 
— suspicious of all save the masses. A true univer- 
salism yet may come from them both. It was in no 
unfriendly humor, but with perfect justice, that the 
*' Putnam " critic declared the new poems to be a 
" mixture of Yankee transcendentalism and New York 
rowdyism," which here were " seen to combine in har- 
mony." For their author prophesied in New York 
with a selfhood that observed but kept aloof from 
the West side ; insensibly the East-sider was set above 
the man of training or affairs whose teams he drove, 
whose fires he subdued, whose boats he piloted, and 
whose manhood perchance was as sturdy and virile 
as his own. Hence, there was a just reason in the 
pleasantry of the reviewer, who, after acknowledging 
that the poet was " one of the roughs," said : " That 
he is a kosmos is a piece of news we were hardly 
prepared for. Precisely what a kosmos is, we trust 
Mr. Whitman will take an early occasion to inform 
the impatient world." Nothing worse than this sally 
befell our poet in the leading magazine, and it was 
added that there were to be found " an original per- 
ception of nature, a manly brawn, and an epic di- 
rectness in the new poet, which belong to no other 
adept of the transcendental school." Here, at all 
events, the book was not treated after any Philistine 
mode. 

Doubtless many young readers of those quotations 
felt as if they came with a fresh breeze from old 
Paumanok and the outer bay. I remember my own 
impression that here, whether his forms were old oi 



FIRSl^ IMPKESSIOXS. 



357 



new, was a real poet, one who stirred my pulses ; 
and of whom — in spite of his conceit, familiarity, as- 
sumption that few could understand him and that all 
needed his ministrations — I wished to know more. 
I would not surrender that tirst impression of his 
c^enius for any later critical feeling. Nor since that 
lime, having closely read him, have I found reason 
to disavow it. And I could sympathize with him, now 
ihat his old age really is at hand, in the serene ap- 
proval of his own work, read twenty years afterward, 
under some ominous conjunction of Saturn and 
Mars : — 

*' After an interval, reading, here in the midnight, 

With the great stars looking on — all the stars of Orion look- 
ing, 

And the silent Pleiades — and the duo looking of Saturn and 
ruddy Mars ; 

Pondering, reading my own songs, after a long interval (sorrow 
and death familiar now), 

Ere closing the book, what pride ! what joy ! to find them 

Standing so well the test of death and night, 

And the duo of Saturn and Mars ! " 

The picture of Whitman in trousers and open 
shirt, with slouched hat, hand in pocket, and a defi- 
ant cast of manner, resolute as it was, had an air 
not wholly of one who protests against authority, but 
rather of him who opposes the gonfalon of a "rough" 
conventionalism to the conventionalism of culture. 
Not that of the man " too proud to care from 
whence " he came, but of one ver}^ proud of whence 
he came and what he wore. Seeing him now, with 
his gracious and silvery beard, it seems hardly possi- 
ble that the early portrait was at any time his own. 
But it has become historical, and properly is retained 
in later editions. 

The " Leaves of Grass " contained the gist of his 



The poet's 
likettess 
afid atti- 
tude. 



358 



WALT WHITMAN. 



A nalysis 
of the 
^^ Leaver of 
Grass.'''' 



Bewilder' 
ment oftJte 
tritics. 



opinions, and some of its episodes equal in beauty 
anything he has ever written. He was in his thirty- 
sixth year, — close upon the age at which more than 
one famous poet has ended his mission. His book 
was eminently one with a purpose, or purposes, to 
which- he has been consistent. First, and chiefly, to 
assert the " Religion of Humanity," — the mystery 
and development of man, of woman ; the sufficiency 
of the general plan ; the inherent and equal nobility 
of our organs, instincts, desires j the absolute equality 
of men, irrespective of birth and training. Secondly, 
to predict a superb illustration of this development, 
in "These States," the great republic of the present, 
the pure democracy of the future. Thirdly, to por^ 
tray an archetypal microcosm, a man embracing in 
his passionate and ideal sympathy all the joys, sor- 
rows, appetites, virtues, sins, of all men, women, and 
children, — himself being, doing, and suffering with 
them, — and that man Walt Whitman. Finally, and 
to lay the groundwork for a new era in literature (in 
his view the most essential stimulant of progress), the 
" Leaves " were written in contempt of established 
measures, formal rhymes, stock imagery and diction, 
— and in a most irregular kind of dithyramb, which 
left the hack reviewer sorely in doubt whether it was 
verse broken off at hap-hazard, or prose run mad. 
Whatever motives led to these results, we must ad- 
mire the courage of a poet who thus burned his ships 
behind him, and plunged into a wilderness thence- 
forth all his own. Various passages of the book were 
resolutely coarse in their naturalism, and were thought 
by some, who perhaps knew little of the author, to 
reveal his tendencies. It seemed as if certain pas. 
sions appeared to him more natural, certain sins more 
venial, than others, and that these were those which 



HIS PERSONAL CAREER. 



359 



he felt to be most obstreperous in his own system, 
— that his creed was adjusted to his personal apti- 
tudes. (But many also found in him strength, color, 
love, and knowledge of nature, and a capacity for 
lyrical outbursts, — the utterance of a genuine poet. 
Such was the " Leaves of Grass," although the book 
is hard to formulate in few and scientific terms ; such, 
at least, it was, so far as I understand its higher 
meaning. 

If the successive editions of '^Leaves of Grass" 
had the quiet sale accorded to books of verse, the 
work did not lack admirers among radicals on the 
lookout for something new. Emerson, with one of 
his cheery impulses, WTOte a glowing welcome, which 
soon was given to the public, and directed all eyes 
to the rising bard. No poet, as a person, ever came 
more speedily within range of view. His age, origin, 
and habits were made known ; he himself, in fastidi- 
ously studied and picturesque costume, w^as to be ob- 
served strolling up Broadway, crossing the ferries, 
mounting the omnibuses, wherever he could see and 
be seen, make studies and be studied. It was learned 
that he had been by turns printer, school-master, 
builder, editor ; had written articles and poems of a 
harmless, customary nature, — until, finding that he 
could not express himself to any purpose in that wise, 
he underwent conviction, experienced a change of 
thought and style, and professed a new departure in 
verse, dress, and way of life. Henceforward he oc- 
cupied himself with loafing, thinking, writing, and 
making disciples and ''camerados." Among the young 
wits and writers who enjoyed his fellowship, his slow, I 
large mould and rathe-grizzled hair procured for \\\v(\ Expe- 
the hearty title of "Old Walt." In the second year ^ 7"^''f^-' , 

•' ^ ■' \ during tfU 

of the war his blood grew warm, and he went to ^ ivar- 



Whit- 
77tan''s fiab' 
its^ haunts^ 
and con- 
spicuous 
daily 
walk. 



36o 



WALT WHITMAN. 



A fortu- 
nate perse- 
cution. 



^^ The Good 
Gray Poet. 
A Vhtdi- 
c at ion.'''' 
NewYor/c, 
1866. 



Disciples 
afid 

friends in 
Europe 
and A mer- 
ica. 



Washington, whither all roads then led. His heart 
yearned toward the soldiery, and in the hospitals and 
camps he became the tenderest of nurses and the al- 
moner of funds supplied to him by generous hands. 
After three years of this service, and after a sickness 
brought on by i^s exertions, he was given a place in 
the Interior Department. Then came that senseless 
act of a benighted official, who dismissed him for the 
immorality of the "Leaves of Grass." To Whitman 
it was a piece of good luck. It brought to a climax 
the discussion of his merits and demerits. It called 
out from the fervent and learned pen of William D. 
O'Connor a surging, characteristic vindication, " The 
Good Gray Poet," in which the offending Secretary 
was consigned to ignominy, and by which the poet's 
talents, services, and appearance were so fastened 
upon public attention that he took his place as a 
hoar and reverend minstrel. He then, with Lowell, 
Parsons, Holland, Brownell, and Mrs. Howe, had 
reached the patriarchal age of forty - six. Another 
Cabinet officer, a man of taste and feeling, gave him 
a new position — which he held for nine years, and 
until somewhat disabled by a paralytic affliction. 
Meanwhile, influential writers, on both sides of the 
ocean, skilful in polemic criticism, had avowed alle- 
giance to himself and his works. In England, W. M. 
Rossetti edited a selection of his poems, and Swin- 
burne, Dowden, Clifford, Symonds, Buchanan, Clive, 
have joined in recognizing them. In America, — be- 
sides O'Connor, — Linton, Conway, Sanborn, Charles 
Whiting, the Swintons, Benton, Marvin, the sure-eyed 
and poetic Burroughs, and others, in turn have guarded 
his rights or ministered to him, some of them with a 
loyalty unprecedented in our literary annals. Like 
Fourier, he may be said to have his propagandists in 



THE POET AND HIS COUNTRYMEN. 



361 



many lands. Making allowance for the tendency to 
invest with our own attributes some object of hero- 
worship, a man must be of unusual stuff to breed 
this enthusiasm ; and under any privations the life 
is a success which has created and sustained such an 
ideal. 

The appearance of Whitman's "Centennial edition," I c/^^re-^^^ 
and his needs at the time, o^ave occasion for an out- ""'•N^'^'^'', . 
cry concerning American neglect and persecution of treatftunt. 
the poet, and for a debate in which both London and 
New York took part. But little evidence was found 
of unfriendliness to him among the magazine-editors, 
to whom our writers offer their wares. Several of 
them averred that they would rather accept than de- 
cline his contributions ; they had declined them only 
when unsuited to their necessities. What magazine- 
writer has a smoother experience ? In a democracy 
the right most freely allotted is that of every man to 
secure his own income. Nor am I aware that, with 
two exceptions, any American has been able to de- 
rive a substantial revenue from poetry alone. A man 
ahead of his time, or different from his time, usually 
gathers little of this world's goods. Whitman's fel- 
low-countrymen regard him kindly and with pride. 
An English poet declared that it was not America, 
but the literary class in America, that " persecuted " 
him. Who constituted such a class I know not, since 
at present it would be hard to find an American au- 
thor or editor who does not keep a warm place in 
his heart for the sage of Camden and hold his gen- 
ius in honor. What opposition the poet really incurred 
has done him no harm. The outer)- led to plain- 
speaking, and the press gave the fullest hearing to 
Whitman's friends. It was of benefit, in showing that 
our writers were misunderstood, in stimulating his 



36 2 



WALT WHITMAN. 



^^ Leaves of 
Grass. ^^ 
'"''T'wo Riv- 
ulet s^ 2 
vols. A u- 
thor''s Cen- 
tennial 
Edition. 
Cajnden., 
N.J.,i^-jb. 

Portraits 
and char- 
acteristics. 



Order of 
contents. 



" Drttin- 
Ta^s."" 



" Two Riv- 
vleis.'' 



friends to new offices in his behalf, and especially in 
promoting the sale of the unique Cententiial Edition 
(or "Author's") of his collected poems. Never was 
a collection more aptly named. The two volumes 
bear the material as well as the spiritual impress of 
their author. Of the many portraits for which he has 
sat, they give, besides the earliest, a bold and recent 
photograph, and the striking wood-cut by his friend 
Linton — that master of the engraver's craft. Here 
and there are interpolated later poems, printed on 
slips, and pasted in by the poet's own hand. It is 
Whitman, His Book. The edition has an indescrib- 
able air ; one who owns it feels that he has a portion 
of the author's sell 

The collection embraces the revised series of 
"Leaves of Grass," preceded by "Inscriptions," and 
divided by a group of poems, " Children of Adam," 
on the sexual conditions of life ; by another group, 
" Calamus," on the love of comrades, and by certain 
pieces, of which " Crossing Brooklyn Ferry " is a good 
specimen, in which the aspect and occupations of the 
people at large, the glory of the American race, and 
of the dwellers in Mannahatta, are specifically chanted 
by this bard of New York. Then follow the " Drum- 
Taps," so full of lyrical fervor that Whitman may be 
called a chief singer of that great conflict to which 
the burning songs of other poets had been an over- 
ture. There also are " Marches Now the War is 
Over," with a few pieces that celebrate the republi- 
can uprisings in Europe, and the first volume closes 
with " Songs of Parting." The second, after a gen- 
eral preface, opens wdth " Two Rivulets," parallel 
streams ot prose and verse, followed by a prose essay 
of a Carlylese type, possibly suggested by Carlyle's 
strictures on America. Much of all this portion, prose 



AS A WRITER OF PROSE: 



363 



"■Demo- 
cratic Vis- 
tas ^'^^ etc. 



Defects of 

Whit- 
tnatt's 
prose. 



and verse, is the least satisfactory of Whitman's writ- 
ings, although greatly in earnest and of most import 
to the author. "The Centennial Songs" (1876) and 
the poems of 1872 (including that fine burst, "The 
Mystic Trumpeter ") come next. Reverting to his 
prose "Rivulet" and the " Democratic Vistas," I do 
not lind, — in these contradictory views of the present, 
notices of weak joints in our armor, and dreams of 
the future, — much that has not been considered by 
many who have helped to guide our republic thus far, 
much that has not occurred to the poet's fellow- 
thinkers, or is not, at least, within their power to 
understand and amend. Neither are they expressed 
in that terse and sufficient language common to rare 
minds, — nor in a way at all comparable to the writ- 
er's surer way of expressing himself in his chosen 
verse. Well-written articles like his recantation of 
Emerson lead one to suspect that his every-day prose 
is distorted intentionally, otherwise I should say that, 
if he is a poet of high rank, he is an exception to the 
•conceit that the truest poets write also the most gen- 
uine and noble prose ; for certainly his usual style is 
no nearer that of healthy, self-sustained English than 
his verse is to ordinary rhythm. A poet's genius may 
reconcile us to that which Cosmo Monkhouse terms 
poetr}" in solution, but prose in dissolution is unde- 
sirable. A continuous passage of good prose, not 
broken up with dashes and parentheses, and other 
elements of weakness, nor marred by incoherent and 
spasmodic expressions, is hard to find in his " Rivu- 
lets " and " Vistas." Both his prose and verse have 
one fault in common, that he underrates the intelli- 
gence of readers. This is visible in constant repeti- 
tion" of his thoughts, often in forms that grow weaker. 



and in his intimation that we are even unwilling to 



364 



WALT WHITMAN. 



'■'■Memo- 
rafida 
dtiri7ig the 
Wary 



Poems on 
Death. 



1/ 

Lincoln'^ s 
'•'■Burial 



A 



comprehend ideas which are familiar to all radical 
thinkers in modern times. 

More impressive in their vivid realism, and as evi- 
dence not to be gainsaid of Whitman^s personal qual- 
ities, are the " Memoranda during the War," homely 
and fragmentary records of his labors among the sol" 
diers. Three years and more were covered by these 
acts of devotion, and it is well they should be com- 
memorated. Their records constitute a picture of his 
life at its highest moment, and are interludes between 
his poems of life and those upon death. The latter, 
under the title, " Passage to India," express the ma- 
turest yearning of his soul. Chastened by illness and 
wise through experience, the singer whose pulses have 
beaten with life's full tide now muses upon Death, — 
the universal blessing. With lofty faith and imagining 
he confronts the unknown. To one so watchful of 
his own individuality, any creed that involves a merger 
of it is monstrous and impossible. He bids his soul 
voyage through death's portals, sure to find 

"The untold want, by hfe and land ne'er granted." 

He is at the farthest remove from our modish 
Buddhism, nor can any Nirvana satisfy his demands. 
In this section his song is on a high key, and less 
reduced than elsewhere by untimely commonplace. 
Here are the pieces inspired by the tragic death of 
Lincoln. The burial hymn, " When Lilacs last," etc., 
is entitled to the repute in which it is affectionately 
held. The theme is handled in an indirect, melo- 
dious, pathetic manner, and I think this poem and 
Lowell's " Commemoration Ode," each in its own 
way, the most notable elegies resulting from the war 
and its episodes. Whitman's is exquisitely idyllic, 
Lowell's the more heroic and intellectual. Even the 
" Genius of These States " might stoop for an instant 



'NOBLE numbers: 



365 



to hear the Cambridge scholar, and I can yield the 
" Burial Hymn " no truer homage than to associate it 
with his Ode. 

A " Poem of Joys " makes an artistic contrast with 
these death-carols, and a group of " Sea-shore Mem- 
ories," with their types and music of the infinite, add 
to the climacteric effect of this division. Unable here 
to cite passages from Whitman, I can at least direct 
the reader how to get at his real capabilities. For his 
original mood, and something of his color, imagina- 
tion, hold upon nature, lyric power, turn then to the 
broad harmonies of the " Sea-shore Memories " ; to 
" Lincoln's Burial Hymn," and the shorter poems 
beyond it; to "The Mystic Trumpeter," and "The 
Wound-Dresser " ; and then, after reading the sixth 
section of the poem, "Walt Whitman," 

" A child said, ' What is the grass ? ' " 

find the two hundred and sixth paragraph, 

" I understand the large hearts of heroes," 

and read to the end of the frigate-fight. These pas- 
sages are a fair introduction to the poet, and you wdll 
go with him farther, until checked by some repulsive 
exhibition, or wearied by pages cheap in wisdom and 
invective or — intolerably dull. Often where he utters 
truths, it is with an effort to give offence, or with ex- 
pressions of contempt for their recipient that well 
might make even the truth offensive. A man does not 
care to be driven with blows and hard names, even to 
a feast, nor to have the host brag too much of the 
entertainment. 



Sugges- 
iiotis to th* 
reader. 



366 



WALT WHITMAN, 



Whit- 
mart's 
fhysical 
and sexual 
theiues a7id 
illustra- 
tions. 



III. 

Here we may as well consider a trait of Whitman's 
early work that most of all has brought it under cen- 
sure. I refer to the blunt and open manner in which 
the consummate processes of nature, the acts of pro- 
creation and reproduction, with all that appertain to 
them, are made the theme or illustration of various 
poems, notably of those with the title " Children of 
Adam." Landor says of a poet that, " on the remark 
of a learned man that irregularity is no indication of 
genius, he began to lose ground rapidly, when on a 
sudden he cried out in the Haymarket, ' There is no 
God.' It was then rumored more generally and more 
gravely that he had something in him. . . . ' Say what 
you will,' once whispered a friend of mine, ' there are 
things in him strong as poison, and original as sin.' " 
But those who looked upon Whitman's sexuality as a 
shrewd advertisement justly might be advised to let 
him reap the full benefit of it, since, if he had no 
more sincere basis, it would receive the earlier judg- 
ment — and ere long be " outlawed of art." This has 
not been its fate, and therefore it must have had 
something of conviction to sustain it. Nevertheless, 
it made the public distrustful of this poet, and did 
much to confine his volumes to the libraries of the 
select few. Prurient modesty often is a sign that 
people are conscious of personal defects ; but Whit- 
man's physical excursions are of a kind which even 
Thoreau, refreshed as he was by the new poet, found 
it hard to keep pace with. The fault was not that 
he discussed matters which others timidly evade, but 
that he did not do it in a clean way, — that he was 
too anatomical and malodorous withal ; furthermore, 
that in this department he showed a morbid interest, 



'CHILDREN OF ADAM,' ETC. 



Z^l 



and applied its imagery to other departments, as if 
with a special purpose to lug it in. His pictures 
sometimes were so realistic, his speech so free, as to 
excite the hue and cry of indecent exjDOSure ; the dis- 
play of things natural, indeed, but which we think it 
unnatural to exhibit on the highway, or in the read- 
ing-room and parlor. 

On the poet's side it is urged that the ground of 
this exposure was, that thus only could his reform be 
consistent ; that it was necessary to celebrate the body 
with special unction, since, with respect to the phys- 
ical basis of life, our social weakness and hypocrisy 
are most extreme. Not only should the generative 
functions be proclaimed, but, also, — to show that 
"there is in nature nothing mean or base," — the side 
of our life which is hidden, because it is of the earth, 
earthy, should be plainly recognized in these poems ; 
and thus, out of rankness and coarseness, a new vi- 
rility be bred, an impotent and squeamish race at last 
be made whole. 

Entering upon this field of dispute, what I have to 
say — in declaring that Whitman mistakes the aim of 
the radical artist or poet — is perhaps different from 
the criticism to which he has been subjected. Let us 
test him solely by his own rules. Doing this, we pre- 
suppose his honesty of purpose, otherwise his objec- 
tionable phrases and imagery would be outlawed, not 
only of art but of criticism. Assume, then, first, that 
they were composed as a fearless avowal of the in- 
stincts and conditions which pertain to him in common 
with the race which he typifies ; secondly, that he 
deems such a presentation essential to his revolt 
against the artifice of current life and sentiment, and 
makes it in loyal reliance upon the excellence, the truth, 
of 7iature. To judge him in conformity with these 



A Uef^ed in- 
decency. 



The Pocfs 
de/ence : 
"rt sane 
sensual- 
ity.'" 



How to test 
this mat- 
ter. 



368 



WALT WHITMAN. 



Genius is 
consistent. 



Wherein 
this poet 
miscon- 
ceives the 
instinct 
and meth- 
od of Na- 
ture. 



^'■Affaire 
Clemen- 
Ceau.'''' 
Paris. 



ideas lessens our estimate of his genius. Genius is 
greatly consistent when most audacious. Its instinct 
will not violate nature's logic, even by chance, and it is 
something like obtuseness that does so upon a theory. 
In Mr. Whitman's sight, that alone is to be con- 
demned which is against nature, .yet, in his mode of 
allegiance, he violates her canons. For, if there is 
nothing in her which is mean or base, there is much 
that is ugly and disagreeable. If not so in itself (and 
on the question of absolute beauty I accept his own 
ruling, " that whatever tastes sweet to the most per- 
fect person, that is finally right "), if not ugly in itself, 
it seems so to the conscious spirit of our intelligence. 
Even Mother Earth takes note of this, and resolves, 
or disguises and beautifies, what is repulsive upon her 
surface. It is well said that an artist shows inferiority 
by placing either the true, the beautiful, or the good, 
above its associates. Nature is strong and rank, but 
not externally so. She, too, has her sweet and sacred 
sophistries, and the delight of Art is to heighten her 
beguilement, and, far from making her ranker than 
she is, to portray what she might be in ideal combi- 
nations. Nature, I say, covers her slime, her muck, 
her ruins, with garments that to us are beautiful. She 
conceals the skeleton, the frame-work, the intestinal 
thick of life, and makes fair the outside of things. 
Her servitors swiftly hide or transform the ferment- 
ing, the excrementitious, and the higher animals pos- 
sess her instinct. Whitman fails to perceive that she 
respects certain decencies, that what we call decency 
is grounded in her law. An artist should not elect 
to paint the part of her to which Churchill rashly 
avowed that Hogarth's pencil was devoted. There is 
a book — the Affaire Clemenceau — in which a French- 
man's regard for the lamp of beauty, and his indif 



HIS MISCONCEPTION OF NATURE. 



369 



ference to that of goodness, are curiously illustrated. 
But Dumas points out, in the rebuke given by a sculp- 
tor to a pupil who mistakenly elevates the arm of his 
first model, a beautiful girl, that the Underside of 
things should be avoided in art, — since Nature, not 
meaning it to be shown, often deprives it of beauty. 
Finally, Whitman sins against his mistress in ques- 
tioning the instinct we derive from her, one which 
of all is most elevating to poetry, and which is the 
basis of sensations that lead childhood on, that fill 
youth with rapture, impress with' longing all human 
kind, and make up, impalpable as they are, half the 
preciousness of life. He draws away the final veil. 
It is not squeamishness that leaves something to the 
imagination, that hints at guerdons still unknown. 
The law of suggestion, of half-concealment, deter- 
mines the choicest effects, and is the surest road to 
truth. Grecian as Whitman may be, the Greeks bet- 
ter understood this matter, as scores of illustrations, 
like that of the attitude of the Hermaphroditus in the 
Louvre, show. A poet violates Nature's charm of feel- 
ing in robbing love, and even intrigue, of their eso- 
teric quality. No human appetites need be pruriently 
ignored, but coarsely analyzed they fall below hu- 
man it}^ He even takes away the sweetness and pleas- 
antness of stolen waters and secret bread. Furto 
cuncta magis bella. The mock-modesty and effemi- 
nacy of our falser tendencies in art should be chas- 
tised, but he misses the true corrective. Delicacy is 
not impotence, nor rankness the sure mark of virility. 
The model workman is both fine and strong. Where 
Whitman sees nothing but the law of procreation, 
poetry dwells upon the union of souls, devotion unto 
death, joys greater for their privacy, things of more 
worth because whispered between the twilights. It 
24 



Tlie lavj of 
Resejme, 
in Nature 
and A rt. 



Tfie an- 
tiqice feel- 
ing. 



Delicacy 
not incon- 
sistent with 
strength- 



70 



WALT WHITMAN, 



spiritual- 
ity essen- 
tialo 



An infer- 
ence and a 
suggestion. 



''Walt 
Whit- 
man's 
Poents.^^ 
Selected 



is absolutely true that the design of sexuality is the 
propagation of species. But the delight of lovers who 
now inherit the earth is no less a natural right, and 
those children often are the finest that were begot 
without thought of offspring. There are other lights 
in which a dear one may be regarded than as the 
future mother of men, and these — with their present 
hour of joy — are unjustly subordinated in the " Leaves 
of Grass." Marked as the failure of this pseudo-nat- 
uralism has been hitherto, even thus will it continue, 
— so long as savages have instincts of modesty, — so 
long as we dream of and draw the forms and faces, 
not the internal substance and mechanism, of those we 
hold most dear, — so long as the ivy trails over the 
ruin, the southern jessamine covers the blasted pine, 
the moss hides the festering swamp, — so long as our 
spirits seek the spirit of all things ; and thus long 
shall art and poesy, while calling every truth of science 
to their aid, rely on something else than the processes 
of science for the attainment of their exquisite results. 
From the tenor of Mr. Whitman's later works, I 
sometimes have thought him half-inclined to see in 
what respect his effort toward a perfect naturalism was 
misdirected. In any case, there would be no inconsis- 
tency in a further modification of his early pieces,— 
in the rejection of certain passages and words, which, 
by the law of strangeness, are more conspicuous than 
ten times their amount of common phraseology, and 
grow upon the reader until they seem to pervade the 
whole volume. The examples of Lucretius, Rabelais, 
and other masters, who wrote in other ages and con- 
ditions, and for their own purposes, have little anal- 
ogy. It well may be that our poet at first had more 
claim to a wide reading in England than here, since 

, omitted 



his English editor. 



without asking consent, 



METHOD OF HIS VERSE. 



11"^ 



entirely every poem "which could with tolerable fair- 
ness be deemed offensive." Without going so far, and 
with no falseness to himself, Whitman might re-edit 
his editions in such wise that they would not be 
counted wholly among those books which are meat 
for strong men, but would have a chance among those 
greater books that are the treasures of the simple and 
the learned, the young and the old. 

IV. 

The entire body of his work has a sign-metrical by 
which it is recognized — a peculiar and uncompro- 
mising style, conveyed in a still more peculiar un- 
rhymed verse, irregular, yet capable of impressive 
rliythmical and lyrical effects. 

The faults of his method, glaring enough in ruder 
passages, are quite his own ; its merits often are 
no less so, but in his chosen form there is little orig- 
inal and new. It is an old fashion, always selected 
for dithyrambic oracular outpourings, — that of the 
Hebrew lyrists and prophets, and their inspired Eng- 
lish translators, — of the Gaelic minstrels, — of various 
Oriental and Shemitic peoples, — of many barbarous 
dark-skinned tribes, — and in recent times put to use 
by Blake, in the " Prophetic Visions," and by other 
and weaker men. There are symptoms in Whitman's 
earlier poems, and definite proof in the later, that his 
studies have included Blake, — between whose traits 
and his own there is a superficial, not a genuine, like- 
ness. Not as an invention, then, but as a striking and 
persistent renaissance, the form that has become his 
trade-mark, and his extreme claims for it, should have 
fair consideration. An honest effort to enlarge the 
poet's equipment, too long unaided, by something rich 



and edited 
by //'. M. 
R ossein, 
Londofi, 



This poefs 
lyricaland 
rJiyihiuical 
7nethod. 



A 



Not a 7iew 
invention. 



Williatn 
Blake. 



It de- 
mands a 
fair exajjt- 
ination. 



372 



WALT WHITMAN. 



^^ What is 
Art?'' 
S. G. W. 
Benj amitu 
Boston : 
1877. 



Outcry 
against 
wonted 
^ortns. 



A 



The ques- 
tion of 
Technique. 



and strange, deserves praise, even though a failure ; 
for there are failures worthier than triumphs. Our 
chanter can bear with dignity the provincial laughter 
of those to whom all is distasteful that is uncommon, 
and regard it as no unfavorable omen. From us the 
very strangeness of his chant shall gain for it a wel- 
come, and the chance to benefit us as it may. Thereby 
we may escape the error pointed out by Mr, Benja- 
min, who says that people, in approaching a work, in- 
stead of learning from it, try to estimate it from their 
preconceived notions. Hence, original artists at first 
endure neglect, because they express their own dis- 
coveries in nature of what others have not yet seen, 
■ — a truth well to bear in mind whenever a singer ar- 
rives with a new method. 

Probably the method under review has had a can- 
did hearing in more quarters than the author himself 
is aware of. If some men of independent thought and 
feeling have failed to accept his claims and his esti- 
mate of the claims of others, it possibly has not been 
through exclusiveness or malice, but upon their own 
impression of what has value in song. 

Whitman never has swerved from his primal indict- 
ment of the wonted forms, rhymed and unrhymed, 
dependent upon accentual, balanced, and stanzaic 
effects of sound and shape, — and until recently has 
expressed his disdain not only of our poets who care 
for them, but of form itself. So far as this cry was 
raised against the technique of poetry, I think not 
merely that it is absurd, but that 'when he first made 
it he had not clearly thought out his own problem. 
Technique, of some kind, is an essential, though it is 
equally true that it cannot atone for poverty of thought 
and imagination. I hope to show that he never was 
more mistaken than when he supposed he was throw 



POETIC FORMS. 



o/ J 



ing off form and technique. But first it may be said 
that no " form " ever has sprung to life, and been 
handed from poet to poet, that was not engendered by 
instinct and natural law, and that will not be accepted 
in a sound ireneralization. Whitman avers that the 
time has come to break down the barriers between 
prose and verse, and that only thus can the Amer- 
ican bard utter anything commensurate with the lib- 
erty and splendor of his themes. Now, the mark of 
a poet is that he is at ease everywhere, — that noth- 
ing can hamper his gifts, his exultant freedom. He 
is a master of expression. There are certain points 

— note this — where expression takes on rhythm, and 
certain other points where it ceases to be rhythmical, 

— places where prose becomes poetical, and where 
verse grows prosaic ; and throughout Whitman's pro- 
ductions these points are more frequent and unmis- 
takable than in the work of any other writer of our 
time. However bald or formal a poet's own method, 
it is useless for him to^'decry forms that recognize 
the pulses of time and accent, and the linked sweet- 
ness of harmonic sound. Some may be tinkling, oth- 
ers majestic, but each is suited to its purpose, and 
has a spell to charm alike the philosopher and the 
child that knows not wh}^ The human sense ac- 
knowledges them ; they are the earliest utterance of 
divers peoples, and in their later excellence still hold 
their sway. Goethe discussed all this with Ecker- 
mann, and rightly said there were "great and myste- 
rious agencies " in the various poetic forms. He 
even added that if a sort of poetic prose should be 
introduced, it would only show that the distinction 
between prose and poetry had been lost sight of com- 
pletely. Rhyme, the most conventional feature of 
ballad verse, has its due place, and will keep it ; it 



Unbound' 
ed liberty 
of the Poet 



Time, 
A ccent, 
Rhythm. 



Goethe''s 
view. 



Rhyme. 



374 



WALT WHITMAN. 



IVhihnan 
upon Eng- 
lish blank 



Glory of 

this su- 
preme 
ttteasure. 
Cp. ''Vic- 
torian 
Poets " .• 
^p. i6o- 
■^62. 



is an artifice, but a natural artifice, and pleases ac- 
cordingly. Milton gave reasons for discarding it when 
he perfected an unrhymed measure for the stateliest 
English poem j but what an instrument rhyme was in 
his hands that made the sonnets and minor poems ! 
How it has sustained the whole carnival of our heroic 
and lyric song, from the sweet pipings of Lodge and 
Chapman and Shakespeare, to the undertones of 
Swinburne and Poe ! There are endless combinations 
yet in the gamut. The report is that Whitman's prej- 
udice is specially strong against our noblest unrhymed 
form, "blank-verse." Its variety and freedom, within 
a range of accents, breaks, caesural effects, — its roll- 
ing organ-harmonies, — he appreciates not at all. 
Rhythmical as his own verse often can be, our future 
poets scarcely will discard blank-verse in its behalf 
— not if they shall recall "The Tempest," "Hail, 
Holy Light," "Tintern Abbey," "Hyperion," the " Hel- 
lenics," " Ulysses," and " Thanatopsis." Mr. Parke 
Godwin, in a private letter, terms it "the grandest 
and most flexible of English measures," and adds, 
with quick enthusiasm : " Oh, what a glory there is 
in it, when we think of what Shakespeare, Milton, 
Wordsworth, and Landor made of it, to say nothing 
of Tennyson and Bryant ! " I doubt not that new 
handlings of this measure will produce new results, 
unsurpassed in any tongue. It is quite as fit as Mr. 
Whitman's own, if he knows the use of it, for "the 
expression of American democracy and manhood." 
Seeing how dull and prolix he often becomes, it may 
be that even for him his measure has been too facile, 
and that the curb of a more regular unrhymed form 
would have spared us many tedious curvetings and 
grewsome downfalls. 

Strenuous as he may be in his belief that the old 



HIS THEORY AND ITS ORIGIN. 



375 



methods will be useless to poets of the future, I am 
sure that he has learned the value of technique through 
his long practice. He well knows that whatever claims 
to be the poetry of the future speedily wmII be for- 
gotten in the past, unless consonant with the laws of 
expression in the language to which it belongs ; that 
verse composed upon a theory, if too artificial in its 
contempt of art, may be taken up for a while, but, 
as a false fashion, anon will pass away. Not that 
his verse is of this class ; but it justly has been de- 
clared that, in wTiting with a purpose to introduce a 
new mode or revolutionize thought, and not because 
an irresistible impulse seizes him, a poet is so much 
the less a poet. Our question, then, involves the spon- 
taneity of his \vork, and the results attained by him. 

His present theory, like most theories which have 
reason, seems to be derived from experience : he has 
learned to discern the good and bad in his work, 
and has arrived at a rationale of it. He sees that 
he has been feeling after the irregular, various har- 
monies of nature, the anthem of the winds, the roll 
of the surges, the countless laughter of the ocean 
waves. He tries to catch this " under-melody and' 
rhythm." Here is an artistic motive, distinguishing 
his chainless dithyrambs from ordinary verse, somewhat 
as the new^ German music is distinguished from folk- 
melody, and from the products of a preceding, espe- 
cially the Italian, school. Here is not only reason, 
but a theoretical advance to a grade of art demand- 
ing extreme resources, because it affords the widest 
range of combination and effect. 

But this comprehension of his own aim is an after- 
thought, the result of long groping. The genesis of 
the early " Leaves " was in motives less artistic and 
penetrating. Finding that he could not think and 



IVhit- 
nuiH^s recf 
satiable 
state jnent 
of his own 
endeavor. 



Its trtie 
origin. 



376 



WALT WHITMAN, 



Quality 
of his eye 
and ear. 



The 

results 

attained. 



work to advantage in the current mode, he concluded 
that the mode itself was at fault ; especially, that the 
poet of a young, gigantic nation, the prophet of a 
new era, should have a new vehicle of song. With- 
out looking farther, he spewed out the old forms, and 
avowed his distaste for poets who still employ them„ 
His off-hand course does not bring us to the conclu- 
sion of the whole matter. So far as the crudeness of 
the juventus mimdi is revived by him, it must be tem- 
poral and passing, like the work of some painters, 
who, for the sake of startling effects, use ephemeral 
pigments. A poet does not, perforce, restore the lost 
foundations of his art by copying the manner natural 
to an aboriginal time and people. He is merely ex- 
changing masters, and certainly is not founding a new 
school. Only as he discovers the inherent tendencies 
of song does he belong to the future. Still, it is 
plain that Whitman found a style suited to his pur- 
poses, and was fortunate both as a poet and a diplo- 
matist. He was sure to attract notice, and to seem 
original, by so pronounced a method. Quoth the 
monk to Gargantua, " A mass, a matin, or vesper, 
well rung, is half said." It was suited to him as a 
poet, because he has that somewhat wandering sense 
of form, and of melody, which often makes one's con- 
ceptions seem the more glorious to himself, as if in- 
vested with a halo or blended with concurrent sound, 
and prevents him from lessening or enlarging them 
by the decisive master-hand, or at once perfecting 
them by sure control. 

A man who finds that his gloves cripple him does 
right in drawing them off. At first. Whitman cer- 
tainly meant to escape all technique. But genius, in 
spite of itself, makes works that stand the test of sci- 
entific laws. And thus he now sees that he was grop' 



ADAPTABILITY Olf GENIUS. 



-hll 



ing toward a broader techiv.que. Unrhymed verse, 
the easiest to wriie, is tlie hardest to excel in, and no 
measure for a bardling. ^ And Whitman never more 
nearly displayed the feruling of a true artist than when 
he expressed a doubt as to his present handling of 
his own verse, but hoped that, in breaking loose from 
transmarine form.s, he had sounded, at least, the key 
for a new paean. I have referred to his gradual ad- 
vances in the finish of his song. Whether he has re- 
vived a forn which others will carry to a still higher 
excellence is doubtful. Blank-verse, limitless in its 
capacities, forces a poet to stand without disguise, 
and reveils all his defects. Whitman's verse, it is 
true, dos not subject him to so severe a test. He 
can so twist and turn himself, and run and jump, 
that w3 are puzzled to inspect him at all, or make 
out hs contour. Yet the few who have ventured to 
follov him have produced little that has not seemed 
like parody, or unpleasantly grotesque. It may be 
that his mode is suited to himself alone, and not to 
thc'-'uture poets of These States, — that the next orig- 
inalgenius will have to sing " as Martin Luther sang," 
and the glorious army of poetic worthies. I suspect 
thai the old forms, in endless combinations, will re- 
tun as long as new poets arise \vith the old abiding 
sen;- of time and sound. 

Te greatest poet is many-sided, and will hold him- 
se^^^ilavishly to no one thing for the sake of differ- 
en-. He is a poet, too, in spite of measure and 
ma^rial, while, as to manner, the style is the man. 
Gen^s does not need a special language ; it newly 
uses hatever tongue it finds. Thought, fire, passion, 
will c^rtop ever}^thing, — will show, like the limbs of 
Teveri^, through the clothes of a prince or a beggar. 
A. che: and common instrument, odious in foolish 



«x 



A dapta- 
bility of 
triie 
genius. 



378 



IVAL'T WHITMAN. 



The style 
is the man. 



A signifi- 
cant/act. 



Copious 
and 

original 
diction. 



Effective 
titles and 
epithets. 



hands, becomes the slaf.ve of music under the touch 
of a master. I attach less importance, therefore, to 
Whitman's experiment in vt^^rse than he and his crit- 
ics have, and inquire of his mannerism simply how 
far it represents the man. To vshow how little there 
is in itself, we only have to think ^ of Tupper ; to see 
how rich it may be, when the utte^rance of genius, 
listen to Whitman's teacher, William IBlake. It does 
not prove much, but still is interesting, . to note that 
the pieces whose quality never fails witih any class 
of hearers, — of which "My Captain" is am example, 
— are those in which our poet has approa.ched most 
nearly, and in a lyrical, melodious manner, t^o the or- 
dinary forms. 

He is far more original in his style propter than 
in his metrical inventions. His diction, on its good 
behavior, is copious and strong, full of surprises, util- 
izing the brave, homely words of the people, and as- 
signing new duties to common verbs and nouns. \ He 
has a use of his own for Spanish and French catch- 
words, picked up, it may be, on his trip to Louisi'iana 
or in Mexican war times. Among all this is mjuch 
slang that now has lived its life, and is not understood 
by a new generation with a slang of its own. This 
does not offend so much as the mouthing verbiage, 
the " ostent evanescent " phrases, wherein he seems 
profoundest to himself, and really is at his worst. '|The 
titles of his books and poems are varied and sonor^^ys. 
Those of the latter often are taken from the opei^jng 
lines, and are key-notes. What can be fresher .an 
" Leaves of Grass " and " Calamus " } What r ,jher 
than " The Mystic Trumpeter," " O Star of France ! " 
" Proud Music of the Storm" ; or simpler than " Drum- 
Taps," " The Wound-Dresser," " The Ox-Tamer " \ 
or more characteristic than " Give me the Splendid 



AS A POET OF NATURE. 



379 



Silent Sun," " Mannahatta," " As a Strong Bird on 
Pinions Free," " Joy, Shipmate, Joy " ? Some are 
obscure and grandiose — "Eidolons," "Chanting the 
Square Deific," but usually his titles arrest the eye 
and haunt the ear ; it is an artist that invents them, 
and the best pieces have the finest names. His ep- 
ithets, also, are racier than those of other poets ; 
there is something of the Greek in Whitman, and his 
lovers call him Homeric, but to me he shall be our old 
American Hesiod, teaching us works and days. 

V. 

His surest hold, then, is as an American poet, 
gifted with language, feeling, imagination, and inspired 
by a determined purpose. Some estimate, as I have 
said, may be made of his excellence and short-com- 
ings, without waiting for that national absorption 
which he himself declares to be the test. 

As an assimilating poet of nature he has positive 
genius, and seems to me to present his strongest 
claims. Who else, in fact, has so true a hand or eye 
for the details, the sweep and color, of American 
landscape ? Like others, he confronts those superb 
physical aspects of the New World which have con- 
trolled our poetry and painting, and deferred the 
growth of a figure-school, but in this struggle with 
Nature he is not overcome ; if not the master, he is 
the joyous brother-in-arms. He has heard the mes- 
sage of the pushing, wind-swept sea, along Paumanok's 
shore ; he knows the yellow, waning moon and the 
rising stars, — the sunset, with its cloud-bar of gold 
above the horizon, — the birds that sing by night or 
day, bush and brier, and every shining or swooning 
flower, the peaks, the prairie, the mighty, conscious 



General 
estimate 
of his 7>ier- 
its and de- 
fects. 



A verita- 
ble poet of 
stature. 



38o 



WALT WHITMAN. 



The 

human 

element 

often 

present. 



r\ 



His ivtag- 
ination. 



river, the dear common grass that children fetch with 
full hands. Little escapes him, not even " the mossy 
scabs of the worm fence, and heap'd stones, mullein 
and poke-weed " ; but his details are massed, blended, 
— the wind saturates and the light of the American 
skies transfigures them. Not that to me, recalling the 
penetrative glance of Emerson, the wood and way-side 
craft that Lowell carried lightly as a sprig of fir, and 
recalling other things of others, does Whitman seem 
our " only " poet of nature ; but that here he is on his 
own ground, and with no man his leader. 

Furthermore, his intimacy with Nature is always 
subjective, — she furnishes the background for his 
self-portraiture and his images of men. None so apt 
as he to observe the panorama of life, to see the 
human figure, — the hay-maker, wagoner, boatman, 
soldier, woman and babe and maiden, and brown, lusty 
boy, — to hear not only "the bravuras of birds, bustle 
of growing wheat, gossip of flames, clack of sticks 
cooking my meals," but also "the sound I love, the 
sound of the human voice." His town and country 
scenes, in peace or in war, are idyllic. From .utter 
want of sympathy, he can only name and designate 
anything above the genre — he does not depict it. A 
single sketch, done in some original way, often makes 
a poem ; such is that reminiscence (in rhyme) of the 
old Southern negress, " Ethiopia Saluting the Colors," 
and such the touching conceit of Old Ireland — no 
fair and green-robed Hibernia of the harp, but an 
ancient, sorrowful mother, white-haired, lean and tat- 
tered, seated on the ground, mourning for her children. 
He tells her that they are not dead, but risen again, 
with rosy and new blood, in another country. This is 
admirable, I say, and the true way to escape tra- 
dition ; this is imaginative, — and there is imagina- 



nrAGINATION. 



381 



tion, too, in his apostrophe to " The Man-of-War- 
Bird " (carried beyond discretion by this highest mood, 
he finds it hard to avoid blank-verse) : — 

*' Thou who hast slept all night upon the storm, 
Waking renewed on thy prodigious pinions ! 

Thou, born to match the gale (thou art all wings) ! 

To cope \vith heaven and earth and sea and hurricane ; 

Thou ship of air that never furl'st thy sails, 

Days, even weeks, untired and onward, through spaces — 

realms gyrating. 
At dark that look'st on Senegal, at morn, America ; 
That sport'Sc amid the lightning-flash and thunder-cloud ! 
In these — in thy experiences — hadst thou my soul. 
What joys ! What joys were thine ! " 

Imagination is the essential thing ; without it poetry 
is as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. Whitman 
shows it in his sudden and novel imagery, and in the 
subjective rapture of verse like this, but quite as often 
his vision is crowded and inconsistent. An editor 
writes to me : '' In so far as imagination is thinking 
through types (eidullia), Whitman has no equal," add- 
ing that he does not use the term as if applied to 
Coleridge, but as limited to the use of types, and that 
" in this* sense it is really more applicable to a master 
of science than to a poet. In the poet the type is 
lodged in his own heart, and when the occasion comes 
. . . he is mastered by it, and he must sing. In 
Whitman the type is not so much in his heart as in 
his thought. . . . While he is moved by thought, often 
grand and elementary, he does not give the intellec- 
tual satisfaction warranted by the thought, but a mov- 
ing panorama of objects. He not only puts aside 
his ' singing-robes,' but his ' thinking-cap,' and resorts 
to the stereopticon."' How acute, how true! There 
is, however, a peculiar qualitv in these long catalogues 



H. M. A/- 
deri's atuil- 
ysis of this 
quality. 



"Cata- 
logues " in 



382 



WALT WHITMAN. 



W hit- 
man'' s 
verse. 

Their 
meaning. 



Pathos 
and ten- 
derness. 



Relations 
of Poetry 
»?td Sci- 
ence, Cj>. 



of types, — such as those in the " Song of the Broad- 
Axe " and " Salut au Monde," or, more poetically 
treated, in " Longings for Home." The poet appeals 
to our synthetic vision. Look through a window; 
you see not only the framed landscape, but each tree 
and stone and living thing. His page must be seized 
with the eye, as a journalist reads a column at a 
glance, until successive " types " and pages* blend in 
the mind like the diverse colors of a swift-turning 
wheel. Whitman's most inartistic fault is that he 
overdoes this method, as if usually unable to com- 
pose in any other way. 

The tenderness of a strong and robust nature is a 
winning feature of his song. There is no love-mak- 
ing, no yearning for some idol of the heart. In the 
lack of so refining a contrast to his realism, we have 
gentle thoughts of children, images of grand old men, 
and of women clothed with sanctity and years. This 
tenderness, a kind of natural piety, marks also his 
poems relating to the oppressed, the suffering, the 
wounded and dying soldiers. It is the soul of the 
pathetic, melodious threne for Lincoln, and of the epi- 
logue — "My Captain!" These pieces remind us 
that he has gained command of his own music, and 
in the matter of tone has displayed strength from the 
first. In revising his early poems he has improved 
their effect as a whole. It must be owned that his 
wheat often is more welcome for the chaff in which it 
is scattered ; there is none of the persistent luxury 
which compels much of Swinburne's unstinted wealth 
to go unreckoned. Finally, let us note that Whitman, 
long ago, was not unread in the few great books of 
the world, nor inapt to digest their wisdom. He was 
among the first to perceive the grandeur of the scien' 
tific truths which are to give impulse to a new and 



DE^rocRAcy ix America. 



383 



loftier poetic imagination, Tliose arc significant pas- 
sages in the poem " W^ilt Whitman," written by one 
who had read the thirty-eighth chapter of Job, and be- 
ginning, "Long I was hugg'd close — long and long." 
The " Leaves of Grass," in thought and method, 
avowedly are a protest against a hackney breed of 
singers, singing the same old song. More poets than 
one are born in each generation, yet Whitman has 
derided his compeers and scouted the sincerity of 
their passion. In two things he fairly did take the 
initiative, and might, like a wise advocate, rest his 
case upon them. He essayed, without reserve or 
sophistry, the full presentment of the natural man. 
He devoted his song to the future of his own country, 
accepting and outvying the loudest peak-and-prairie 
brag, and pledging These States to work out a per- 
fect democracy and the salvation of the world. Strik- 
ing words and venturesome deeds, for which he must 
have full credit. But in our studies of the ideal and 
its votaries, the failings of the latter cannot be lightly 
passed over. There is an inconsistency, despite the 
gloss, between his fearful arraignment, going beyond 
Carlyle's, of the outgrowth of our democracy, thus 
far, and his promise for the future. In his prose, he 
sees neither physical nor moral health among us : all 
is disease, impotency, fraud, decline. In his verse, 
the average American is lauded as no type ever was 
before. These matters renew questions which, to say 
the least, are still open. Are the lines of caste less 
sharply divided every year, or are the high growing 
higher, and the low lower, under our democracy? 
Is not the social law of more import than the form of 
government, and has not the quality of race much to 
do with both? Does Americanism in speech and lit- 
erature depend upon the form and letter, or upon the 



" Victo- 
rian 
Poets'': 
pp. 7-21, 
170, 193, 
343- 

Protest 
against 
coftven- 
tionalism. 



Realism, 
and De- 
mocracy : 
tJie cardi- 
nal pri7ici 
pies of 
Whit- 
man's 
song. 



His incoiH' 
plete jndg- 
7/iefit of 
Democ- 
racy in 
A merica. 



See pp, 
4-n. 



384 



WALT WHITMAN. 



Narrow- 
ness his 
■main de- 
fect. 



Class feel- 
ing. 



spirit? Can the spirit of literature do much more 
than express the national spirit as far as it has gone, 
and has it not, in fact, varied with the atmosphere ? 
Is a nation changed by literature, or the latter by the 
former, in times when journalism so swiftly represents 
the thought and fashion of each day ? As to distinc- 
tions in form and spirit between the Old-World litera- 
ture and our own, I have always looked for these to 
enlarge with time. But with the recent increase of 
travel and communication, each side of the Atlantic 
now more than ever seems to affect the other. Our 
" native flavor " still is distinct in proportion to the 
youth of a section, and inversely to the development. 
It is an intellectual narrowness that fails to meditate 
upon these things. 

Thus we come to a defect in Whitman's theories, 
reasoning, and general attitude. He professes univer- 
sality, absolute sympathy, breadth in morals, thought, 
workmanship, — exemption from prejudice and for- 
malism. Under all the high poetic excellences which 
I carefully have pointed out, I half suspect that his 
faults lie in the region where, to use his ov^^n word, 
he is most complacent : in brief, that a certain nar- 
rowness holds him within well-defined bounds. In 
many ways he does not conform to his creed. Others 
have faith in the future of America, with her arts and 
letters, yet hesitate to lay down rules for her adop- 
tion. These must come of themselves, or not at all. 
Again, in this poet's specification of the objects of his 
sympathy, the members of every class, the lofty and 
the lowly, are duly named ; yet there always is an im- 
plication that the employer is inferior to the employed, 
— that the man of training, the " civilizee," is less 
manly than the rough, the pioneer. He suspects 
those who, by chance or ability, rise above the crowd. 



HIS SPECIAL COXSTITUENCY. 



385 



What attention he does pay them is felt to be in the 
nature of patronage, and insufferable. Other things 
being equal, a scholar is as good as an ignoramus, a 
rich man as a poor man, a civilizee as a boor. Great 
champions of democracy — poets like Byron, Shelley, 
Landor, Swinburne, Hugo — often have come from 
the ranks of long descent. It would be easy to cite 
verses from Whitman that apparently refute this state- 
ment of his feeling, but the spirit of his whole work 
confirms it. Meanwhile, though various editions of 
his poems have found a sale, he is little read by our 
common people, who know him so well, and of whose 
democracy he is the self-avowed herald. In number- 
less homes of working-men — and all Americans are 
workers — the books of other poets are treasured. 
Some mental grip and culture are required, of course, 
to get hold of the poetry of the future. But Whit- 
tier, in this land, is a truer type of the people's poet, 
— the word " people " here meaning a vast body of 
freemen, having a common-school education, homes, 
an honest living, and a general comprehension far 
above that of the masses in Europe. These folk 
have an instinct that Whittier, for example, has seized 
his day with as much alertness and self-devotion as 
this other bard of Quaker lineage, and has sung songs 
" fit for the New World " as he found it. Whitman 
is more truly the voice and product of the culture of 
which he bids us beware. At least, he utters the cry 
of culture for escape from over-culture, from the weari- 
ness, the 'finical precision, of its own satiety. His 
warmest admirers are of several classes : those who 
have carried the art of verse to super-refined limits, 
and seeing nothing farther in that direction, break up 
the mould for a change; those radical enthusiasts 
who, like myself, are interested in whatever hopes to 
25 



Not the 
people'' s 
poet. 



Whittier. 



Whitman, 
a product 
oftJte 
times., anA 
a favorite 
luith 
special 
classes. 



386 



WALT WHITMAN. 



Tlia charm 
ofThoreau 
and Biir- 
rojisrhs. 



Whit- 
man'' s ex- 
cessive for- 
malism. 



A ^t vs. 
A rtijice. 



bring us more speedily to the golden year ; lastly, 
those who, radically inclined, do not think closely, 
and make no distinction between his strength and 
weakness. Thus he is, in a sense, the poet of the 
over-refined and the doctrinaires. Such men, too, as 
Thoreau and Burroughs have a welcome that scarcely 
would have been given them in an earlier time. From 
the discord and artifice of our social life we go with 
them to the woods, learn to name ihe birds, note the 
beauty of form and flower, and love these healthy 
comrades v/ho know each spring that bubbles beneath 
the lichened crag and trailing hemlock. Theocritus 
learns his notes upon the mountain, but sings in 
courts of Alexandria and Syracuse. Whitman, through 
propagandists who care for his teachings from meta- 
physical and personal causes, and compose their own 
ideals of the man, may yet reach the people, in spite 
of the fact that lasting works usually have pleased all 
classes in their own time. 

Reflecting upon his metrical theory, we also find 
narrowness instead of breadth. I have shown that 
the bent of a liberal artist may lead him to adopt a 
special form, but not to reject all others ; he will see 
the uses of each, demanding only that it shall be good 
in its kind. Swinburne, with his cordial liking for 
Whitman, is too acute to overlook his formalism. 
Some of his eulogists, those whom I greatly respt-ct, 
fail in their special analysis. One of them rightly 
says that Shakespeare's sonnets are artificial, and that 
three lines which he selects from " Measure for Meas- 
ure " are of a higher grade of verse. But these are 
the reverse of "unmeasured" lines, — they are in 
Shakespeare's free and artistic, yet most measured, 
vein. Here comes in the distinction between art and 
artifice ; the blank-verse is conceived in the broad 



EXCESS/VE FORMALISM. 



387 



spirit of the former, the finish and pedantry of the 
sonnet make it an artificial form. A master enjoys 
the task of making its artifice artistic, but does not 
employ it exclusively. Whitman's irregular, manner- 
istic chant is at the other extreme of artificiality^ and 
equally monotonous. A poet can use it with feeling 
and majesty ; but to use it invariably, to laud it as the 
one mode of future expression, to decry all others, is 
formalism of a pronounced kind. I have intimated 
that Whitman has carefully studied and improved it. 
Burroughs does him injustice in admitting that he is 
not a poet and artist in the current acceptation of 
those terms, and another writer simply is just in de- 
claring that when he undertakes to give us poetry he 
can do it. True, the long prose sentences thrown 
within his ruder pieces resemble nothing so much as 
the comic recitativos in the buffo-songs of the con- 
cert-cellars. This is not art, nor wisdom, but sensa- 
tionalism. There is narrowness in his failure to recast 
and modify these and other depressing portions of 
various poems, and it is sheer Philistinism for one to 
coddle all the weaknesses of his experimental period, 
because they have been a product of himself. 

One effect of the constant reading of his poetry is 
that, like the use of certain refections, it mars our 
taste for the proper enjoyment of other kinds. Not, 
of course, because it is wholly superior, since the 
most subtile landscape by Corot or Rousseau might 
be utterly put to nought by a melodramatic neighbor, 
full of positive color and extravagance. Nor is it 
always, either, to our bard's advantage that he should 
be read with other poets. Consider Wordsworth's 
exquisite lyric upon the education which Nature gives 
the child whom to herself she takes, and of whom 
she declares : — 



07ie effect 
of rcadhig 
his verse. 



Compara' 
tive crit- 
ic is VI. 



388 



WALT WHITMAN. 



The 

charge of 
affecta- 
tion. 



Preten- 
sions. 



" The stars of midnight shall be dear 
To her ; and she shall lean her ear 
In many a secret place, 

Where rivulets dance their wayward round, 
And beauty born of murmuring sound 
Shall pass into her face." 

It happens that Whitman has a poem on the same 
theme, describing the process of growth by sympath}! 
and absorption, which thus begins and ends : — 

" There was a child went forth every day ; 
And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became ; 
And that object became part of him. for the day, or a cer- 
tain part of the day, or for many years, or stretching cy- 
cles of years. 

The horizon's edge, the flying sea-crow, the fragrance of salt- 
marsh and shore-mud ; 

These became part of that child who went forth every day, 
and who now goes, and will always go forth every day." 

Plainly there are some comparative advantages in 
Wordsworth's treatment of this idea. It would be just 
as easy to reverse this showing by quoting other pas- 
sages from each poet : the purpose of my digression 
is to declare that by means of comparative criticism 
any poet may be judged unfairly, and without regard 
to his general claims. 

So far as Whitman's formalism is natural to him, 
no matter how eccentric, we must bear with it ; when- 
ever it partakes of affectation, it is not to be desired. 
The charge of attitudinizing, so often brought against 
his writings and personal career, may be the result of 
a popular impression that the border-line is indistinct 
between his self-assertion as a type of Man and the 
ordinary self-esteem and self-advancement displayed 
by men of common mould. Pretensions have this 
advantage, that they challenge analysis, and make a 



SEL F-A SSER TIOiV. 



389 



vast noise even as we are forced to examine tlieni. 
In the early preface to the '' Leaves " there is a pas- 
sage modelled, in my opinion, upon the style of Emer- 
son, concerning simplicity, — with which I heartily 
agree, having constantly insisted upon the test of sim- 
plicity in my discussion of the poets. Yet this qual- 
ity is the last to be discerned in many portions of 
the " Leaves of Grass." In its stead we often find 
boldness, and the " pride that apes humility," — until 
the reader is tempted to quote from the " Poet of 
Feudalism " those words of Cornwall upon the rough- 
ness which brought good Kent to the stocks. Our 
bard's self-assertion, when the expression of his real 
manhood, is bracing, is an element of poetic strength. 
When it even seems to be "posing," it is a weak- 
ness, or a shrewdness, and 't is a w^eakness in a poet 
to be unduly shrewd. Of course a distinction must 
be carefullv made between the fine extravao^ance of 
genius, the joy in its ow^i conceptions, and self-con- 
scious vanity or affectation, — between, also, occasional 
weaknesses of the great, of men like Browning, and 
like the greatest of recent masters, Hugo, and the af- 
flatus of small men, who only thus far succeed in 
copying them. And it would be unjust to reckon 
Whitman among the latter class. 

It may be that his strictures upon the poets of his 
owqi land at one time made them hesitate to venture 
upon the first advances in brotherhood, or to intrude 
on him with their recognition of his birthright. As 
late as his Centennial edition, his opinion of their 
uselessness was expressed in withering terms. He 
declared that he could not except " a single writer " 
from his indictment of the "genteel" producers of 
" pistareen, paste-pot work," and inveighed against I 
the "copious dribble, either of our little or well-known! 



Frequent 
zvani of 
irjte siifi- 
plicity. 



Whit- 
7)ia?i's crit- 
icism of 
other poetS' 
E.g. 
''''Deryio- 
cratic 
Jlstas,^'' 
( Cent!. 
Ed.\pp. 
32, 54> 5S. 



390 



WALT WHITMAN. 



A n egoist 
by nature^ 
and on 
^inciple. 



rhymesters." It is just to add that recently, if the 
reports of interlocutors are trustworthy, he has ex- 
cepted " Bryant, Emerson, Whittier, and Longfellow — 
these only and proportionately in the order given " 
— from his former criticism, and has stated that his 
general attitude is eminently respectful. If it were 
not, there would be no inconsistency, in view of his 
purpose and convictions, nor any reason for complaint. 
There was no consistency, however, in complaints that 
arose in various quarters, to some of which I have 
before referred, concerning a lack of recognition and 
encouragement from his fellow-craftsmen. There is 
ample ground for his scorn of the time-serving, un- 
substantial quality of much of our literature. But I 
should not be writing this volume, did I not well 
know that there are other poets than himself who 
hear the roll of the ages, who look before and after, 
above and below. The culture vv^hich he deprecates 
may have done them an ill turn in lessening their 
worldly tact. I am aware that Whitman's poems are 
the drama of his own life and passions. His sub- 
jectivity is so great that he not only absorbs all 
others into himself, but insists upon being absorbed by 
whomsoever he addresses. In his conception of the 
world's equality, the singer himself appears as the one 
Messianic personage, the answerer and sustainer, the 
universal solvent, — in all these respects holding even 
" Him that was crucified " to be not one whit his su- 
perior. It is his kiss, his consolation, that all must 
receive, — whoever you are, these are given especially 
to you. But men are egotists, and not all tolerant 
of one man's selfhood ; they do not always deem the 
affinities elective. Whitman's personality is too strong 
and individual to be universal, and even to him it is 
not given to be all things to all men. 



THE ALPENGLOW. 



391 



VI. 

But there is that in venerableness which compels 
veneration, and it is an instinct of human nature to 
seek the blessing and revere the wisdom of the poet 
or peasant transfigured by hoary hairs : — 

" Old age superbly rising ! O welcome, ineffable grace of dying 
days ! " 

I was one of a small but sympathetic audience 
ofathered in New York to hear Mr. Whitman, at the 
cordial request of authors, journalists, and artists, 
deliver a lecture upon Abraham Lincoln. As he 
entered, haltingly, and took the seat placed for him, 
his appearance satisfied the eye. His manly figure, 
clothed in a drab suit that loosely and well became 
him, his head crowned with flowing silvery hair, his 
bearded, ruddy and wholesome face, upon which sat a 
look of friendliness, the wise benignity that comes 
with ripened years, all these gave him the aspect of 
a poet and sage. His reminiscences of the martyr 
President were slight, but he had read the hero's 
heart, had sung his dirge, and no theme could have 
been dearer to him or more fitly chosen. The lec- 
ture was written in panoramic, somewhat disjointed, 
prose, but its brokenness was the counterpart of his 
vocal manner, with its frequent pauses, interphrases, 
illustrations. His delivery was persuasive, natural, by 
turns tender and strong, and he held us with him 
from the outset. Something of Lincoln himself seemed 
to pass into this man who had loved and studied 
him. A patriot of the honest school spoke to us, 
yet with a new voice — a man who took the future 
Into his patriotism, and the world no less than his 
own land. 



A benign 
a?id lov- 
able old 
age. 



Lecture 
upon Lui- 
cohi : Neia 
York, 1S78. 



392 



WALT WHITMAN. 



4 rhapso- 
iist. 



%unt.mary. 



I wished that the youths of America could hear him, 
and that he might go through the land, reading as he 
did that night, from town to town. I saw that he was 
by nature a rhapsodist, like them of old, and should 
be, more than other poets, a reciter of the verse that 
so aptly reflects himself. He had the round forehead 
and head which often mark the orator, rather than 
the logician. He surely feels with Ben Jonson, as 
to a language, that " the writing of it is but an acci- 
dent," and this is a good thing to feel and know. 
His view of the dramatic value of Lincoln's death to 
the future artist and poet was significant^ It was the 
culminating act of the civil war, he said : "Ring down 
the curtain, with its muses of History and Tragedy 
on either side." Elsewhere his claim to be an Amer- 
ican of the Americans was strengthened by a pecul- 
iarly national mistake, that of confounding quantity 
with quality, of setting mere size and vastness above 
dramatic essence. When the brief discourse was 
ended, he was induced to read the shorter dirge, '' O 
Captain ! My Captain ! " It is, of his poems, among 
those nearest to a wonted lyrical form, as if the gen- 
uine sorrow of his theme had given him new pinions. 
He read it simply and well, and as I listened to its 
strange, pathetic melodies, my eyes filled with tears, 
and I felt that here, indeed, was a minstrel of whom 
it would be said, if he could reach the ears of the 
multitude and stand in their presence, that not only 
the cultured, but " the common people heard him 
gladly." 

Although no order of talent or temperament, in 
this age, can wholly defy classification, there never- 
theless is a limbo of poets, artists, thinkers, men of 
genius, some of whose creations are so expressive, and 



PARADOXICAL GENIUS, 



39. 



othei^ so feeble and ill-conceived, that any discussion 
of their quality must consist alternately of praise and 
advers-c criticism. Reviewing what has been written, 
I see that the career and output of the poet under 
notice are provoccftive of each in some extreme, and 
unite to render him a striking figure in that disputed 
estate. 

Walt Whitman, then, has seemed to me a man who 
should think well of Nature, since he has received 
much at her hands ; and well of Fortune, since his 
birth, training, localities, have individualized the char- 
acter of his natural gifts ; and well of Humanity, for 
his good W'orks to men have come back to him in the 
devotion of the most loyal and efficient band of adher- 
ents that ever buoyed the purpose and advanced the 
interests of a reformer or poet. He has lived his life, 
and warmed both hands before its fire, and in middle- 
age honored it with widely praised and not ignoble 
deeds. Experience and years have brought his virile, 
too lusty nature to a wiser harmony and repose. He 
has combined a sincere enthusiasm with the tact of a 
man of the world, and, with undoubted love for his 
kind, never has lost sight of his own aim and reputa- 
tion. No follower, no critic, could measure him with 
a higher estimate than that which from the first he 
has set upon himself. As a poet, a word-builder, he 
is equipped with touch, voice, vision, zest, — all trained 
and freshened, in boyhood and manhood, by genuine 
intercourse with Nature in her broadest and minutest 
forms. From her, indeed, he is true-born, — no bas- 
tard child nor impostor. He is at home with certain 
classes of men ; but here his limitations begin, for he 
is not great enough, unconscious enough, to do more 
than assume to include all classes in his sympathy 
and brotherhood. The merits of his verse are lyrical 



Whit- 
mati's 
equip- 
7nent. 



394 



WALT WHITMAN. 



His gen- 
ius and 
limita- 
tions. 



His futtire 

reputa- 
tion. 



passion and frequent originality, ~ a copious, native, 
surprising range of diction, — ■ strong feeling, softened 
by consummate tenderness and pity, - — a method low- 
ered by hoarseness, coarseness, and much that is very 
pointless and dull, yet at its best charged with melody 
and meaning, or so near perfection that we are irked 
to have him miss the one touch needful, — a skill that 
often is art, but very seldom mastery. As a man of 
convictions, he has reflected upon the idea of a true 
democracy, and sought to represent it by a true Amer- 
icanism ; yet, in searching for it and for the archetypal 
manhood chiefly in his own personality, it is not 
strange that he has frequently gratified his self-con- 
sciousness, while failing to present to others a satis- 
factory and well-proportioned type of either. His dis- 
position and manner of growth always have led him 
to overrate the significance of his views, and inclined 
him to narrow theories of art, life and song. He 
utters a sensible protest against the imitativeness and 
complacency that are the bane of literature, yet is 
more formal than others in his non-conformity, and 
haughtier in his plainness than many in their pride- 
Finally, and in no invidious sense, it is true that he 
is the poet of a refined period, impossible in any other^ 
and appeals most to those who long for a reaction, a 
new beginning; not a poet of the people, but emi- 
nently one who might be, could he in these days avail 
himself of their hearing as of their sight. Is he, 
therefore, not to be read in the future .'' Of our living 
poets, I should think him most sure of an intermittent 
remembrance hereafter^ if not of a general reading. 
Of all, he is the one most sure — waiving the question 
of his popular fame — to be now and then examined ; 
for, in any event, his verse will be revived from time 
to time by dilettants on the hunt for curious treasures 



HIS PLA CE IX LITER A TURE. 



395 



in the literature of the past, by men who will reprint 
and elucidate him, to join their names with his, or to 
do for this singer what their prototypes in our day 
have done for Francois Villon, for the author of " Jo- 
seph and his Brethren," and for William Blake, 



CHAPTER XI. 



Taylor's 
career to 
be noted in 
ilbcstra- 
tio7i of 
rece7it 
conditions. 



The qiies- 

ti07i o/ S71C- 

cess. 



T 



BAYARD TAYLOR. 

HIS poet, the last and youngest of those here 
made the subjects of distinct review, is no longer 
a living comrade. The consecrating hand that re- 
moved him enables us to free our judgment from 
bias of rivalry or affection. 

'* Far off is he, above desire and fear ; 
No more submitted to the change and chance 
Of the unsteady planets." 

He was taken in his prime, with work spread out be- 
fore him, yet not until after years of unceasing pro- 
duction. We find ourselves observing one whose 
ideal was higher than anything which his writings, 
abundant as they are, express for us, and one who 
none the less has claims to be estimated in some de- 
gree by that ideal. His life was noteworthy ; it was 
a display of heroic industry, zest, ambition, the brav- 
est self-reliance, — and from slight beginnings he 
achieved much. But he was one whose success must 
be gauged from within. What was his dream ? Did 
he realize it ? If not, what hindered him ? These 
questions must be asked ; and, in trying to answer 
them, we see the peculiar advantages which the ca- 
reer of Taylor proffers for an understanding of the 
literary movement, the social and working life, in 
which he was involved. Not that he was our most 
famous singer, nor one whose score was completed, — ■ 



AUTHORSHIP IN NEW YORK. 



397 



but what American poet ever touched life and let- 
ters more variously ? He let nothing go by him, he 
essayed everything, and he furnishes examples of 
what to do — and what to avoid. Moreover, his 
story enables us to study American authorship under 
somewhat different conditions from those which have 
affected the Cambridge group, and with it a period 
whose bisecting line is indicated by the date of the 
beginning of our civil war. 

The task laid upon the pioneers of letters in New 
York has been sufficiently hard, — always the need 
of devotion, toil, patient laying of foundations on 
which others shall build. Inherited names and re- 
sources, and the advantage of university life, have fa- 
vored the growth of the New England school. Poets 
who have strayed into New York — and here they 
are more seldom born than imported — have carried 
the harp with one hand and some instrument of labor 
with the other, and have sung their songs in such 
noonings as they could obtain. Almost without ex- 
ception they have been thrown upon journalism for 
a support, and have experienced whatever good and 
evil that profession brings to the ^Esthetic sense of 
its practitioner. Bayard Taylor was not only a sturdy 
and courageous example of a poet born out of New 
England, but must be studied with the period already 
named. Younger than our chief poets still living, he 
stood with a few companions who found their music 
broken in upon by the tumult of a national war. 
Thus, we are to consider the writings of one who 
dates half-way between the elder and the rising gen- 
erations; who was not of Cambridge, nor of Concord, 
but from the Middle States \ and in whose works, al- 
though the product of a life of action, we always find 
the influences of the study and the hearth. 



NewYork, 
See p. 53. 



Obiter 
cantata. 



The Civil 
War. 



398 



BAYARD TAYLOR. 



A versa- 
tile au- 
thor. 



Born in 

Ke7i7iett 

Sqtiare., 

Penn., 

Jan. II, 

1825. 



JLarly life 
9,nd long- 



I. 

Taylor was the most versatile of authors. This 
was the result of constitutional tendency, increased 
by the exigencies of American life and his own life 
in particular. He was one, I think, whose natural 
gift could as well be understood through his personal 
qualities as from his works. His presence and story 
were so unreservedly before us as to afford para- 
digms of the birth and breeding of a poet. A critic 
takes kindly to verse which has a man behind it. He 
strives to put himself in harmony with the singer's 
youth, manhood, and intellectual prime, — to measure 
his ideals no less than his performances, — to feel his 
aids and restrictions, — to breathe, as it were, the 
very breath of his inspiration. It is worth while to 
bear in mind the region from which this poet came, 
and the kinship that exists between the fields, the 
trees, the air, and all living and sentient things be- 
longing to a given spot of earth. The happy pas- 
toral county of a central State produced Bayard Tay- 
lor from its oldest and purest Quaker stock. Here 
lie the broad undulating meadows and woodlands of 
a section wholly characteristic of the temperate zone. 
Here nature has no extremes of grandeur or pictu- 
resqueness, nor any gloomy aspects, but is simple, at- 
tractive, strong; here it blends, as in English rural 
landscape, all attributes in just proportion. The sons 
of such a soil are rounded and even in their make, 
sound of brawn and brain, open to many phases of 
life, — not likely, once having touched the outer world, 
to content themselves with one experience or. one 
purpose. 

Young Bayard throve upon the nourishment which 
Nature offered him. His sensibilities were those of 



EARLY EXPERIENCES. 



399 



her poets and artists. The trees, the flowers, the 
grasses, he knew them all ; he was no sportsman, but 
"named all the birds without a irun." His farming; 
duties often were forgotten in rovings and reveries, 
and moods uncomprehended either by himself or by 
those about him. Then the eager devouring of books, 
old-fashioned novels, history, travels ; above all, of the 
poetry within his reach. His youth was that of the 
traditional American boy, and here, as always, the 
story of Rasselas repeats itself. The fairest native 
valley palls upon the lad who as yet has nothing by 
which to measure its worth. Tranquillity for the old \ 
for the young, a longing for a new and larger range. 
But time rights all things : as no town-bred person 
ever really knows the country, so no country-lad in 
older years forgets the secrets Nature taught his child- 
hood. Taylor had through life the frank and some- 
what homely simplicity of the yeoman, cosmopolite as 
he was. In time he learned how glad his youth had 
been, and again and again returned to the fields of 
Kennett. But the boy's impatience of his confines 
was early shown. After the schooling at a country 
academy, where he studied well, came the revolt from 
farm-life and the alternative selection of a trade. Of 
course he chose to be a printer, and at the age of sev- 
enteen became an apprentice in West Chester. Al- 
ready he had found his gift of making verses, and 
now took fire with the thought of being a poet. The 
publication of his juvenile pieces grew out of his de- 
sire to see the world. 

A thin little book, now so hard to find, entitled 
Ximena, was dedicated to Griswold, in gratitude for 
"kind encouragement" shown the author. It show^s 
the course of his early readings . Byron, Scott, Moore, 
Mrs. Hemans, Brj^ant, are echoed here and there. A 



'''' Xime7ia ; 
. . . ajid 
Oilier Po- 
ems" 1844, 



400 



BAYARD TAYLOR. 



Sonorous 
quality. 



His 

" Trav- 
els ''"': from 
" Views 
Afoot,'" 
1846, to 
'■'■Egypt 
and Ice- 
land.,'''' 
1874. 
{Eleven 
vols. ) 



^^ Roaming 
with a 
hungry 
heart.'''' 



blank-verse poem is inscribed to Whittier, whose name 
was a household word in the Quaker home. Though 
this book contained no new note, it did show the am- 
bition and facile gift of the writer. One quality is 
apparent which afterward marked his verse, — a pe- 
culiar sonorousness, especially in the use of resonant 
proper nouns, the names of historic persons and places. 
" Ximena " was printed at a venture, for the purpose 
of increasing the savings with which to undertake a 
tramp over Europe, at that time an almost fanciful 
design. From the proceeds he was enabled to see 
those patrons in Philadelphia who advanced him, on 
the pledge of his future labors, the little sum which 
encouraged him to set out upon his travels. After 
reaching New York he hastened to the Tribune office, at 
that time the Mecca of rustic enthusiasts, few of whom 
placed too modest a valuation upon their own powers. 
However, it was no common youth, this stripling of 
nineteen, who won the interest of Horace Greeley, and 
already had found practical friends in Willis, Griswold, 
Godwin, and the kindly editor of " Graham's Maga- 
zine." 

Here I may as well consider the sentiment of the 
journeys which employed so large a portion of his 
life, and the quality of their record. The latter be- 
gan in 1846 with the famous Views Afoot., and ended 
with Egypt and Iceland in the Year 1824, a date only 
five years previous to the sudden close of his career. 

The gist of the matter is that Taylor was a poet 
upon his travels. A national instinct was expressed 
in the going out of this wiry, erect, impetuous young 
man, "to see the world." The same desire that brings 
a Western youth to the Atlantic shore has sent our 
coast-born lads on strange voyages to many lands. 
Grant White averred that while the air of England was 



THE 'TRAVELS? 



401 



yet new to him, he felt that it was something he was 
" born to breathe." For us the old strangeness and 
distance no more yield the charm which belonged to 
the pages of Irving and Willis and Mitchell. 

But in Taylor's case no home-ambition could restrain 
his desire for travel. He went abroad that he might 
see and learn and grow. His journals were under- 
taken chiefly to give him the means of adventure. 
He made no scientific pretensions. He was some- 
thing of a botanist, a natural geographer, could see the 
form beneath the color, and had enough of general 
knowledge to make his narrative rich and intelligible. 
Before all, he sought the delight of the eye, and that 
series of sensations which Pater declares to be the 
sum of life. He had a poet's sense of the best every- 
where, and a poet's sympathy with any land to which 
he came. Hence we journey with him, and enjoy his 
own emotions ; we experience his passion to reach the 
summits, the ultimate deserts, the extreme capes. 
Such is the spirit of his Travels. We read much in 
them of scenery and external things ; he reserved for 
his private letters what he had to say of the men and 
women whose friendship he gained. His perceptions 
enabled him, though going rapidly over many regions, 
to get the special quality of each. In all these books 
there is the essential truth of the poet ; if they are a 
reporter's letters, they are those of a poet acting as 
reporter. He wrote of what he saw, and saw with 
faithful eyes. 

Viewing them in this light, I have little to add in 
respect to their literary merits. The style is that of 
true prose ; no sing-song and sentimentalism ; a clear 
and wholesome medium of expression. Its two ex- 
tremes, of compact polish and unstudied freshness, are 
to be found, the one in that collection of sketches 
26 



His aifn 
and equip' 
inent- 



Prose 
style. 



402 



BAYARD TAYLOR. 



^The Tri- 



*'^Rhymes 
of Trav- 
el^ Bal- 
lads, etc.,'''' 



See " The 
Literati.'''' 



A portrait 
ly Read. 



which was almost his last, the " By- Ways of Europe," 
and the other in the romantic "Views Afoot" — the 
story of his first tour, whose publication made him 
widely known, and invested him with a friendly inter- 
est. His connections were influential. Greeley and 
Dana, editors of the journal to whose staff he was 
attached, which had an immense inland circulation, 
and with whose radical tenets he was in sympathy, 
took pleasure in advancing his reputation. 

Early success, and the attention of the public, — 
great things for any author, — are still not without 
peril to the faculty divine of the poet. Taylor had 
kept up the habit of putting his impressions into verse. 
Two years after his return, he printed the Rhymes of 
Travel. The preface stated that this was the first 
venture to which he had " intrusted a hope of success, 
for the sake of Poetry alone." Among the best- 
remembered lyrics is " A Bacchic Ode." A few 
Western ballads gave freshness to the book. It was 
approved by Poe, who found imaginative eloquence in 
Taylor's style, but on the whole these Rhymes do not 
seem to me remarkable even as a poet's first offering. 
Bayard was now twenty-four years old, and surely, 
recalling the work of Bryant, and Keats, and Shelley, 
at or before the same age, could not be thought a 
precocious singer. There was little then in American 
life to stimulate precocity in song. Besides, his nature 
was so ardent that slight and common sensations in- 
toxicated him, and he estimated their effect, and his 
power to transmit it to others, beyond the true value. 

Nothing so quaintly indicates the place he now held, 
and the conception formed of him by his provincial 
readers, as the sentimental portrait by Buchanan Read 
which served as a frontispiece to the " Rhymes of 
Travel." The steel engraving gives us Taylor as he 



ARCADIA. 



403 



pauses in the act of climbing the Alps. A slender 
youth, in face and form resembling Shelley, and 
equipped like one of Dunyan's Pilgrims, with a palm- 
er's hat, blouse and belt, and a shepherd's crook in 
his hand for an alpenstock ; lofty peaks in the back- 
ground ; all deliciously operatic and impossible. Such 
was the popular notion of Taylor, and it often brought 
out a merry laugh from him and his friends in later 
years. But those w^ere simple, fortunate times for the 
young minstrel, who took his success modestly and 
gladly, nor forgot his work withal ; and he now en- 
joyed a season as poetic as ever afterward came to 
him. Indeed, he now was in circumstances more fa- 
vorable than in later years for the cultivation of his 
art. He had secured the means of support, and 
formed associations which gave him the fellowship and 
rivalry of comrades in taste and ambition. He got 
hold of what he needed, art-life, and embraced it with 
a zest. Through his established success he could aid 
and encourage his friends, and they in turn did good 
to his hand and training. Sooth to say, he prized 
his Arcadian life far more than his sudden honors; it 
always was first in his affections. He loved his brother 
bards with the full strength of his large mould, gave 
them freely of his praise, and frankly welcomed their 
appreciation in return. 

A newspaper mission to the new Eldorado gave him 
some picturesque themes. In that pioneer time the 
scenes and groups upon the Pacific coast had not the 
aspect which Bret Harte has caught and used so well. 
But there was a fresh atmosphere in the pictures of 
Taylor's " Californian Ballads/' and a ring in their 
tone. Stoddard and himself had met shortly before 
this journey. They were wdthin a year of each other 
in age, and their friendship, when Taylor settled down 



'"'■Excel- 
sior I " 



Tile ^^ coftr 
sonancjy 
of our 
youth:'' 



Califor- 
nian bal- 
lads^ of 



Taylor 
and Stod- 
dard. 



404 



BAYARD TAYLOR. 



Boker. 



*'A Book 

ofRo- 

tnances, 

Lyrics, 

and 

1851. 



''Hylas:' 



See p. 311. 



again to city journalism, became close and stimula- 
tive. The aspirations of the two poets were the same. 
They held counsel together in their sky-chambers, 
and wrote and studied in concert. Their books were 
dedicated to each other. Soon Boker, of Philadel- 
phia, a year or two their senior, — born to what Gris- 
wold termed " a life of opulent leisure," but always 
the ally of his brother-poets, — became the third in a 
chivalrous trio. His " Calaynos " had given him rep- 
utation as a dramatic poet. A life-long friendship was 
established among the three. All this seems the mem- 
ory of salad-days, but it is from such enthusiasms that 
new poetic fashions grow. Ten years more, and 
younger poets were added to the group, — O'Brien, 
Aldrich, and others, — among whom Taylor was a 
central figure, holding the friendship of all. 

Meanwhile these Arcadian influences had told upon 
his genius. He brought out in Boston, under the 
classic auspices of the Ticknor house, a volume which 
gave the first measure of his lyrical powers. A Book 
of Romances contained pieces that rank among the 
best he wrote. Here was the style, quite matured, 
which seems most genuinely his own. The chief value 
of the collection was in miscellaneous pieces that have 
the quality which makes good art always fresh to us. 
These rank with the best American verse written up 
to that time. Nor do I know one of our elder or 
younger poets who might not be glad to have com- 
posed such an idyl as " Hylas," with its strong blank- 
verse made soft and liquid by feminine endings, the 
Dorian grace infused with just enough sentiment to 
make it effective in modern times. It is worthy of a 
place in Landor's " Hellenics," and in my own mind 
always is associated with " The Hamadryad." None of 
.Taylor's later classical pieces is quite so good as this. 



'A BOOK OF romances: 



405 



There also are two charming oriental stories, in blank- 
verse, — a measure which he managed well, — '" Ku- 
bleh," and "The Soldier and the Pard." "Ariel," 
" Sorrowful Music," and the " Ode to Shelley," re- 
mind us too much of that poet, from whose influence 
Taylor never quite freed himself, nor desired to free 
himself, until his dying day. These are fine poems, 
and so are others notably his own — " Sicilian Wine," 
" Taurus," " Serapion," and " The Metempsychosis of 
the Pine." The last-named lyric may be taken as a 
specimen of his characteristic mode. 

I have said that this volume contained the first 
fruits of an interval when the poet felt most keenly 
the compensations of art-life. And so it did ; for it 
was by work like this that he was able to pass be- 
neath and out from the shadow of a sombre cloud. 
The painful romance of his youth ; the lingering ill- 
ness of the girl to whom he was betrothed, the mar- 
riage only a month before she died, — all this broke 
in upon precious days, and effected more than a tem- 
porary change. It was Taylor's nature not to take 
lightly such a loss, nor to hold loosely so tender a 
memory. His grief was foretokened in the Decem- 
ber lyric, " Moan, ye wild winds, around the pane ! " 
It was the motive of a succession of memorial pieces, 
expressing moods of sorrow, that ended only years 
afterward, with the "vision" of "The Poet's Jour- 
nal." But now it wore him down, sent him again on 
his wanderings, and determined that his life should 
become one of restless, varying action. 

His most extended journey began in 1851, shortly 
after the appearance of the " Romances." He trav- 
elled in Spain, Egypt, the Orient, etc., until 1854, 
and during this time not only wrote the letters which 
made three volumes of prose, but also continued to 



Influence 
0/ Shelley. 



Mary Ag- 
tie-du : died, 
Dec, 1850. 

See ''''Life 
and Let- 
ters of 
Bayard 
Taylor. 
Edited by 
Marie 
Hansen- 
Taylor 
and Hor- 
ace E. 
Scudder,''^ 
1884. 



4o6 



BAYARD TAYLOR. 



'■^ Poems of 
the Ori- 
ent.,'' 1854. 



His best 

lyrical 

work. 



A western 
A siatic. 



exercise his poetic skill. The main result was the 
Poems of the Orient, 

This volume contains the best work of his purely 
lyrical period, and may justly be characterized as 
vivid, spontaneous, harmonious in tone and artistic 
in execution. Of all the regions which Taylor now 
had traversed, the Orient seemed most nearly to 
touch his own nature. His adaptability to the life 
and sentiment of any land was surprising; he was 
our typical example of the only being that can ac- 
commodate itself to all extremes of climate and cus- 
tom. But he seemed to have been born for the Ori- 
ent, and if his Songs do not set forth the East as 
orientals know it, they do set forth Taylor in the 
East : — 

" The Poet knew the Land of the East, — 
His soul was native there." 

It needed not Hicks's picture of the bronzed travel- 
ler, in his turban and Asiatic costume, smoking, cross- 
legged, upon a roof-top of Damascus, to show how 
much of a Syrian he then was. Others saw it in 
those down-drooping eyelids which made his profile 
like Tennyson's ; in his aquiline nose, with the ex- 
pressive tremor of the nostrils as he spoke ; in his 
thinly tufted chin, his close-curling hair ; his love of 
spices, music, coffee, colors, and perfumes ; his sen- 
sitiveness to out-door influences, to the freshness of 
the morning, the bath, the elemental touch of air 
and water and the life-giving sun. It is to be found 
in the " Poems of the Orient," where we have these 
traits reflected in diverse lyrics that make a fascinat- 
ing whole. In them he seemed to give full vent to 



his flood of song. 



Whether from regard to the crit- 



icism that charged him with rhetoric and exuberance, 



'POEMS OF THE ORIENT: 



407 



or from the languor of work and travel, in after life 
his poetry often was more restrained, less fervid and 
exhilarating. 

The tone of the Eastern poems is by turns glowing 
and languorous, and usually rich in color and sound. 
The poet's intellect keeps him above the race he cel- 
ebrates. A western Epicurean, he gets the best out 
of the East, — its finest passion and wisdom and its 
changeless soul. A sonnet interprets Nubia, the land 
of dreams and sleep : — 

" Hush ! for she does but sleep ; she is not dead : 
Action and Toil have made the world their own, 
But she hath built an altar to Repose." 

The varying skies of Egypt, the Desert, the Syrian 
Coast, of Damascus, of Persia, free these poems from 
the honeyed monotony of Moore's orientalism, and 
the bookishness of Southey's. In manner, however, 
they sometimes remind us of Byron and of Hunt, and 
even of Tennyson, whose melodies have haunted so 
many singers, and whose " Maud " appeared in the 
same year with the lyrics before us. Here are some 
oriental tales in rhymed pentameter, and one in octo- 
syllabic verse. " The Temptation of Hassan Ben 
Khaled " is the longest and best, the model of a nar- 
rative poem. William Morris has done nothing better 
of the kind. One wishes that Taylor had paid more 
attention to narrative poetry, availing himself, like 
Morris, of legends ready to his hand. He told a story 
in verse so easily and delightfully that he always un- 
derrated both the art and the poets who have excelled 
in it. " Amran's Wooing " is another good story — a 
tale of the Desert. Here also are songs, that will last 
as long as anything the poet wrote : — 

" Daughter of Egypt, veil thine eyes ! " 



Narrative 
verse. 



Two nota' 
ble softgs. 



4o8 



BAYARD TAYLOR. 



and the favorite "Bedouin Song": — 

" From the Desert I come to thee 
On a stallion shod with fire ; 
And the winds are left behind 

In the speed of my desire. 
Under thy window I stand, 

And the midnight hears my cry s 
I love thee, I love but thee, 

Wi'th a love that shall not die — 
Till the suit grows cold, 
And the stars are old. 
And the leaves of the Judgment Book 
unfold r'' 

There is a reminiscence of Shelley in one stanza ; but 
this song has its own character. There is a faultless 
idyl in quatrains, celebrating the Hindoo legend of the 
coming of Camadeva, that affords a fine instance of ^ 
quality which marks the " Poems of the Orient," that 
of restraint — the reserved strength which will not give 
one stroke too much. At last the poet folds his tent 
and unwinds the turban from his brow : — ■ 

" The sun has ceased to shine ; the palms that bent, 
Inebriate with light, have disappeared; 
And naught is left me of the Orient 

But the tanned bosom and the unshorn beard." 

These lyrics are free from moralizing and show little 
of the influence of Longfellow, which at that time was 
so visible in American verse ; they are poetry uttered 
for poetry's sake, and with the voice that sings inde- 
pendently. 

A revised edition was issued of Taylor's earlier 
poems, including also maturer pieces written for the 
magazines. Stoddard, Taylor, and others, were now 
engaged with the elder poets in supplying the verse 
which made attractive the first series of " Putnam's 
Monthly Magazine." This periodical was fortunate, 



^'' Poems of 
Home and 
Travel,^ ^ 

'.^55- 

■' Put- 
nam'' s 
Monthly,'''' 
etc. 



A DIVIDED AMBITION. 



409 



like a successor, " The Atlantic Monthly," in its choir 
of songsters. Nor was it wanting- in prose-poems, 
such as the delicate and haunting stories by the author 
of "Lotus-Eating" and "Nile Notes of a Howadji." 
These books and Taylor's oriental poems were the 
complements of one another, and equally refreshing to 
the stay-at-home public that welcomed them. 

The poet-traveller was now in his thirtieth year. 
Assuming that his work now showed the quality of 
his developed gift, we may examine its value. If he 
never had done anything more, if his summons had 
come at this time, — there would have been, even as 
now^, few whose taking-off would be so deplored, 
around whose memory would gather a more regretful 
interest. We should speak of the promise of a career, 
and say, " Had he but lived ! " He did live, and for 
years was a working man of letters, and must be 
judged by nis product to the end. His life was con- 
secrated to poetry, yet not devoted to it. How much 
this means ! Possibly he gained all the laurels he had 
a right to expect, under the conditions in which he 
acquiesced. To look further involved the surrender 
of immediate honors, of rare experience, of growth 
in various directions. It would have been strange in- 
deed if, at his age, he had not accepted " the goods 
the gods provide," — trusting, through strength and 
future occasion, to make even his half service of the 
muse as effective as the entire fealty of others who 
have won the crown. 

Taylor had the elements of prolonged growth. Being 
what he was at thirty, the undisturbed practice of his 
art, a devotion like that of Tennyson's or Longfellow's, 
should have given him indisputable poetic fame. He 
would have refined that subtler sense which, as no 
one knows more surely than the present writer, is so 



Curtis's 
ideal writ- 
ings. 



Charac- 
teristics. 



A divided 
ambition- 



4IO 



BAYARD TAYLOR. 



Capabili- 
ties. 



persona ' 
traits. 



elusive, so often dulled or stunted by the force, the 
outcry, the perturbing conflicts of the social, the trad- 
ing, the professional, or even the patriotic and politi- 
cal, world of action and toil. Still, this poet's capa- 
bilities, aside from his gift of song, were unique, and 
pressed for employment. His memory was prodigiou&o 
Nothing that he learned was forgotten, and he learned 
without effort. After a single reading he knew a poem 
by heart, and could repeat whole pages of his favorite 
authors ; and there was little that he did not read or 
see. His perception of externals was alert and true ; 
but he did not so readily catch by intuition the thoughts 
and feelings of those about him. He had a fine sense 
of form and color, drew and painted creditably, and 
seemed a natural artist. His linguistic powers were 
well known. He taught himself something of the 
classical texts, and was more infused with the antique 
sentiment than many a learned Theban, He quickly 
caught the pass-words and phrases of any language, 
Shemitic or Aryan, wherever he journeyed. German 
he mastered, wrote in, thought in ; it became so much 
like a native tongue with him as to refute the theory 
that one gains of a new language only so much as he 
loses of his own. His personal traits were no less 
admirable. To think of him is to recall a person 
larger in make and magnanimity than the common 
sort ; a man of buoyancy, hopefulness, sweetness of 
temper, — loyal, shrinking from contention, yet ready 
to do battle for a principle or in the just cause of a 
friend ; stainless in morals, and of an honesty so nat- 
ural that he could not be surprised into an untruth 
or the commission of a mean act. His open delight 
over any work of his own that pleased him was the 
reverse of egotism, yet often misunderstood by those 
who slightly knew him. He was without jealousy^ 



HIS POETIC STYLE. 



411 



though sometimes ruffled by the prosperity of quacks 
and pretenders. Yet his personal ambition and aspira- 
tion were very great, only equalled by his industry 
and scrupulous fulfilment of any task he undertook. 
In social life he was generous and unrestrained, full 
of the knightly, mirth-loving, romantic spirit ; a poet 
who kept his heart green to the last, even when disease 
was upon him, and the plethoric habit of his middle 
life. These dulled his eye, but never broke his spirit 
nor turned his thoughts to gall. 

As a poet, I say, the qualities of his mature style 
were now fairly displayed. From the beginning, 
rhythm, the surrcusis of liquid measures, had much 
to do with his sense of the beautiful in verse, and 
reacted upon his imagination. He revelled in the ef- 
fect of the broad English vowels, the "hollow ae's 
and oe's," and in the consonantal vigor of our lan- 
guage. He enjoyed reading aloud the poetry of Bar- 
ley, of Byron and Shelley, and read his own with 
such melody and resonance that one who listened to 
its chanting sound was no more able than himself to 
tell whether it was of his poorest or his best. Its 
dominant quality, therefore, was often that of elo- 
quence, as in the verse of Croly and Campbell. Poe 
quoted from one of his early pieces, to show that 
eloquence and imagination may go together. I have 
said that Bryant was " elemental " in his communion 
with sea and forest and the misty mountain winds. 
Taylor, as to the general range of his poetry, was 
ethnical and secular. Nations, races, eras, the past 
and future of mankind, were the objects of his re- 
gard ; he got his material, his imaginative pictures, 
from their aspect, and his most elevated verse relates 
to their historic and prophetic phases. His art-method 
was simple and direct, obvious rather than suggestive, 



Style as a 
poet. 



An ethni- 
cal range. 



4-12 



BAYARD TAYLOR. 



Over- 
facility, 



Involved 
expres- 
sion. 



His Penn- 

sylvanian 
idyls. 



" The 
Quaker 
Widow;' 
etc. 



and he generally composed in a major key. Some of 
his measures are fresh with the breeze and spray. 
In other moods he would write a ballad, or a tender 
lyric like " The Song of the Camp." He had the 
spontaneity of a born singer ; but with it a facility 
that was dangerous indeed. His first draft was apt 
to be his best if not his only one. He had few af- 
fectations ; his instinct being against obscurity and 
oddness of expression. He made his verse, as far as 
might be, the clear vehicle of his feeling. Of late 
years, in the desire to convey his deeper, more intel- 
lectual thought and conviction, he frequently became 
involved, and a metaphysical vagueness was apparent 
even in his lyrics. At such times critics thought his 
efforts strained, and his friends declared that he was 
not working in his best vein. 



II. 

Much of Taylor's poetry does not bear its maker's 
hand-mark so distinctly as that of Longfellow or 
Whittier is wont to do. His subjects and modes of 
treatment are varied, and the former may be assorted 
in groups, — the classical pieces, the dithyrambic lyr- 
ics, the poems of travel, and those of hearth and 
home. In any mood he was apt to reach a certain 
standard of merit ; he rarely failed. But there was 
one field — though he scarcely seemed to realize its 
value — so much his own as to breed for him a num- 
ber of rough imitators. From it he made such stud-^ 
ies, of the rural scenes and characters he best knew, 
as "John Reid," "The Old Pennsylvania Farmer," 
and that lovely ballad, unexcelled in truth and ten- 
derness of feeling — "The Quaker Widow." The 
poet more rarely gave voice to the extremes of pa» 



CONDITIONS AFFECTING HIS WORK. 



413 



sion. Even his noon-day health and manliness some- 
times blunted his delicacy of touch. And yet, when 
he felt with his whole heart, he could be not only 
refined but highly imaginative, as in *' Euphorion," — 
a poem addressed to friends who had lost a dreamy 
and beautiful child : — 

" For, through the crystal of your tears, 
His love and beauty fairer shine ; 
The shadows of advancing years 

Draw baclv, and leave him all divine. 

" And Death, that took him, cannot claim 
The smallest vesture of his birth, — 
The little life, a dancing flame 

That hovered o'er the hills of earth, — 

*' The finer soul, that unto ours 
A subtle perfume seemed to be, 
Like incense blown from April flowers 
Beside the scarred and stormy tree, — 

*' The wondering eyes, that ever saw 

Some fleeting mystery in the air, 

And felt the stars of evening draw 

His heart to silence, childhood's prayer ! " 

These stanzas are at the highest reach, I think, of 
Taylor's lyrical genius. The man who could write 
them, and who composed the Bedouin Song and the 
Pennsylvanian idyls, was a poet whose fame should 
be dear to his countr}m"ien. But he did much more. 
Of wiiat kind, and under what conditions ? Here 
comes in the lesson of his life as a poet, and it is 
chiefly as a poet that we are considering him. 

Authors are pretty sure to give us something of 
value when they render the feeling of localities to 
which they belong. A sympathetic poet is in danger 
of lessening his birthright through much knowledge 
of the world at large. Taylor was patriotic, always 



'■'■Enpho. 



Remarks 
oil the life 
oftJiispoet 



414 



BAYARD TAYLOR. 



Bums and 

Whittier, 



Taylor's 
more va- 
ried expe- 
yiences. 



American ; yet I think his lyrical mark would have 
been still higher had his relations been confined, if 
not to the section that gave him birth, at most to his 
own land and people. His native qualities were not 
unlike those of Burns and Whittier ; these three poets 
were more similar, as they came from the mould, 
than any others whom I call to mind. Burns was a 
healthy country lad, full of the prodigal force of na- 
ture, blown on by her breezes, nurtured by her soil, 
thrilled by emotions as he felt the rich sap of youth 
coursing through his veins. His influences were those 
of his own people. His first efforts imitated the 
plodding of the *' Caledonian Bards." When some- 
what matured, he awoke to the beauty of the true 
Scottish minstrelsy, and adapted his own song to it. 
Suppose that opportunities for travel, wider culture, 
varied reading, the mastery of languages, had been 
given him. One nail drives out another. He might 
have been hampered with his acquisitions ; his muse 
would have subdued her strength in diverse strains ; 
he no longer would have been the fine, untrammelled 
specialist, — and might have wholly lost his native 
wood-notes wild. Whittier owes his fame to his se- 
clusion — voluntary or involuntary — and to his pres- 
entation of the themes and feeling nearest the heart 
of New England. His work is thus a specific addi- 
tion to American song. His early pieces, like those 
of Burns, were artificial. It was not until after growth 
and fervid conviction that his lips were really touched 
with fire. 

It was Taylor's good fortune, as a man who would 
live his life, — his ill fortune, it may be, as a poet, — 
to obtain the multiform experience for which his 
youth had longed. We admire his pluck and advent- 
ure, but lament what was lost to poetry. At times 



LIFE AND ART. 



415 



His own 
theory of 
life a7id 
art. 



when his fine spirit, bound within a home range, 
would have made the most of its surroundings, he 
was able to gratify without stint his love of travel 
and observation. His poetic gift was always by him ; 
but surely he lost much in exchange for what he 
gained. One can readily conceive the lyrical genius 
of Whittier as subject to be diffused or perplexed 
under similar conditions. The question lies between 
personal attainment and the extreme utilization of an 
artist's special gift. Taylor chose the former. He 
said, " If I have any ambition, it is to enjoy as large 
a store of experience as this earth can furnish." In 
a letter which I received from him he wrote : " If I 
were to write about myself for six hours, it would all 
come to this : that life is, for me, the establishing of 
my own Enfelccheia, — the making of all that is pos- 
sible out of such powers as I may have, without vio- 
lently forcing or distorting them." Circumstances 
aided him in his choice. As a youth, he thought 
little of the effect upon his poetic career, or possibly 
thought he was promoting it. Later on, however 
"rich and ample" his life, he felt a sense of uneasi- 
ness. He cared most of all, in his heart of hearts, 
to be a poet, and saw that, while going afar to invoke 
the Muse, he had given her the less chance to seek 
him. Choose between the ideal and the actual — 
such is the alternative of art. Few can eat their cake 
and have it, too. Delight of life and action has 
turned aside many a swift runner, as I have shown 
in reference to Domett and Home. Again, whatever 
may be said of the benefits and disadvantages of cult- 
ure, it often has been a practical injury to the poet 
— since no one is sure of life's full limit — to set 
before him too high and broad an ideal. It may not 
always be best to aim at the sun. We ask of a man 



A n alter* 
native. 



4i6 



BAYARD TAYLOR. 



His envi- 
ronment. 



Art and 
letters in 
the New 
World 
metropO' 
lis. 



the one thing he can do better than other men, and 
often, as in the legend of Gaspar Becerra, " that is 
best which lieth nearest." Then there are hindrances 
born of success itself, and to these Taylor was pecu- 
liarly subjected. 

He became involved with the literary life of New 
York, and at a trying time. It was just early enough 
for him to receive a good word from Poe, and late 
enough for him to witness the rout of the "literati." 
Even a sham literary feeling may be better than no 
feeling at all. Has New York gained since then as 
a literary centre? Yes, and no. It is now the base 
from which our authors draw their supplies. The 
great journals, the profitable magazines, the largest 
publishing houses, with few exceptions, are located 
there. It is the chief centre of distribution, and will 
so remain until some future period shall number as 
many great centres of distribution as there may be 
characteristic sections. But the atmosphere, • — the 
public feeling which alone can foster rising art and 
make its workmen glad and creative, — this gathers 
more slowly. Authors are tolerated, respected, valued 
as accessories ; but not always understood, nor often 
intrusted with the care of important movements. New 
York has a sufficiency of writers and of literary ele- 
ments for the needs of many smaller cities ; but the 
former do not feel themselves sustained by that sym- 
pathetic interest which, for example, encourages the 
music of Naples, the art of Paris or Rome. New 
York is great in material progress, generous in chari- 
ties ; but still too practical to do much more than to 
affect an aesthetic sentiment. Her wealthy classes are 
groping toward the comprehension of what is beauti- 
ful. They have schools of design, and are surpassing 
not only the troglodytes, but our more immediate an- 



NEWSPAPER WORK, ETC. 



417 



cestors, in mural decoration. What is intellectually 
fine we have yet to pursue with any general ardor. 
The city took a pride in Bryant as a man and as a 
picturesque figure on state occasions ; but how many 
of his townsmen had read the most of his poems, 
or cared to read them ? Herein is no reason for 
complaint ; all is as it should be. If individuals are 
not coddled in New York, they at least have an equal 
chance, and there are not lacking assurances of fu- 
ture development. 

Thus Taylor's lot was cast in a somewhat uncon- 
genial city, and he often found himself praised and 
courted where he needed the stimulus of intelligent 
sympathy. He took to journalism, and it was his 
mainstay through life. During the last thirty years, 
journalism has absorbed much of our best talent, and 
well it might, for it demands the best. No severer 
test can be applied to a writer than that of his ability 
to furnish leading articles regularly. More than one, 
who has succeeded easily as a bookwright or essayist, 
has found his equipment and his power of composition 
inadequate to the off-hand production of compact, pol- 
ished, well-informed leaders, such as are needed for 
the editorial pages of great new^spapers. Journalism 
is an art ; but under our system it brings little be- 
yond his weekly stipend to the sub-journalist. The 
stipend is sure, and that means a great deal to one 
who lives by his pen. Newspapers thus far have sup- 
plied the readiest market to a writer, and the maga- 
zines next to them. The task of daily writing for the 
press, while a good staff, is a poor crutch ; it diffuses 
the heat of authorship, checks idealism, retards the 
construction of masterpieces. Besides, it brings an 
author into attrition with members of the craft who 
possibly know him so familiarly as to underrate him. 
27 



Journal- 
isvi vs. 
ideality. 



See pp. 
75-ioS, 
a7id cp. 
" Victorian 
Poets " .• 
//. 81, 82. 



4i8 



BAYARD TAYLOR. 



Lecturing. 



''Cedar- 
crofty 



'■'■Little 
foxes.'''' 



Question 
of Amer- 
ican over- 
work. 



He is subjected to local jealousies, to the over-praise 
of the newspaper which befriends him, and sometimes 
to the unjust or ungenerous treatment of rival sheets. 
All this may be thought an evil peculiar to New York, 
and one which we shall outgrow. But the same phe^ 
nomena are visible in the matured capitals of England 
and France, and must be accepted as part of a jour- 
nalist's warfare and surroundings. 

Newspaper-work, then, to which Taylor owed so 
much of his current reputation, also restricted his ad- 
vance as a creative author. He felt constrained to 
hold, by this and by lecturing, the popularity he had 
gained, and likewise to obtain the means of carrying 
out his scheme of life. As a man of note, his home- 
pride grew upon him. He chose to realize a dream of 
possessing a sightly house and broad acres in Kennett, 
■ — a manor-home where he could place his parents, 
and find a retreat in times of rest. All this he did, 
in his early prime ; such a man can have anything for 
which he will pay the price. Its cost to him, no doubt, 
was a lessening of his quality as a poet. A pressure 
of social and professional duties — meetings, speeches, 
correspondence — bore upon him severely. Under it 
he made a good fight ; hopeful, generous, considerate, 
trying to do something in a field where the laborers 
were too few. But men do not escape from tasks they 
once assume, and he had undertaken to earn a large 
income and survey the world, on the one hand, and 
to hold the Muse by her pinions on the other. His 
poetry had to be composed " between spells " and on 
the wing ; more than all, the versatile habit of his life 
became a second nature to him. 

There is much unfairness, however, in the blame to 
which public men in this country are subjected for 
their overwork. This is rather a matter of necessity 



' THE POETS journal: 



419 



than of choice. People in the old world largely in- 
herit their means and methods from their forbears ; 
new men, even there, often have the habit of over- 
work fixed upon tliem by the time their footholds are 
secured. But the statesmen and thinkers of Europe 
start with assured incomes more commonly than do 
our own, and are not forced to earn their bread as 
they go along. Our Eastern Brahmins, however, have 
had for the most part resources which they have en- 
larged by the help of such gende, scholarly pursuits 
as the service of a university affords. They have 
shown themselves quite willing to indulge a spirit of 
restfulness and calm. So long as Americans who do 
not inherit estates have the Anglo-Saxon pride and 
domestic tenderness, they will be tempted to do work 
elsewhere than in a garret, and rarely be able to drive 
from their minds the thought of its effect upon an 
income-paying constituency. 



III. 



Taylor married in Germany, and his choice was 
fortunate. She whose hand he gained was by her 



Married to 
Marie 
Haiisen^ of 

talents and acquirements in every sense his compan-i g^^^'/w:: 
ion, — in full sympathy with his purposes, for happy ^ ^^' 
years the wise and tender guardian of his household, 
as she is now the faithful treasurer of his memory 
and fame. Her translations made his works known 
to her countrymen ; she confirmed his taste for the 
thought and letters of her Fatherland, and was his 
constant aid in the study of them. 

The Poefs Jow-nal w^as an expression of the happi- 'TA^/'^- 
ness for which its author had now exchano-ed the tri- ^^\7f"L' 

^ «a/,' 1S63. 

als of the past. Its chief interest is found in a rev^- 
elation of the author's heart. The prelude, to the 



420 



BAYARD TAYLOR. 



Middle 
life. 



Taylor^s 
Novels. 



mistress of Cedarcroft, is not excelled by anything 
which follows. Years afterward, he made a still more 
earnest avowal of his wedded content : — 

" With thee was the ceasing of sorrow. 
Hope from thy lips I have drawn, and subtler strength from 

thy spirit, 
Sharer of dream and of deed, inflexible conscience of Beauty ! 
Though as a Grace thou art dear, as a guardian Muse thou art 

earnest, 
Walking with purer feet the paths of song that I venture, 
Side by side, unwearied, in cheerful encouraging silence. 
Not thy constant woman's heart alone I have wedded; 
One are we made in patience and faith and high aspiration." 

The poet's life of travel, writing, lecturing, means- 
providing, now went forward busily. Duties and hon- 
ors grew upon him. His interest in the civil war gave 
birth to some vigorous popular ballads. We need not 
follow his public career, nor his periodical returns to 
the shade of his own chestnuts and tulip-trees. His 
friend Aldrich compares Taylor's life to a drama, of 
which the intervals were filled with the' music of his 
poetic work at home. Four fifths of this he was to 
enact, and we thought to see his mind's "noblest off- 
spring " with the last ; but the curtain fell abruptly, 
and the putting out of the lights ended a performance 
that steadily had grown in worth. What there was 
of it was marked by rare experiences. Among his 
friends, he counted the wise and gifted of many lands. 
He had their respect and confidence ; and his corrcv 
spondence with them was most extensive. His pri- 
vate letters were delightful, and a sheet covered with 
his beautiful handwriting and flowing thoughts was a 
thing to prize and store away. 

Partly with the thought to try his hand — like 
Goethe, whom he seemed to have taken as a master 
— at every kind of work, and partly as a form of 



NOVELS AND CRITICAL WRITINGS, 



421 



literature suited to the times, he essayed novel-writ- 
ing. His novels sold well, and appeared to hit the 
popular taste. They mostly were 'realistic transcripts 
of what he had seen, and contained his own views 
of what was, and what was lacking, in American life 
at that time. The plot of LLamiah Thurston is noth- 
ing ; the tale was written to illustrate types of char- 
acter and phases of society, — especially to show up 
tlie mock-reforms of the day. The heroine is a 
Quakeress, as good and original a creation as is to 
be found in the w^hole course of these novels. The 
hero, like most of their heroes, is something of a 
muff. Taylor's second novel, John Godfrey's Fortime^ 
has commonplace and unattractive New York scenes, 
but these are truthful records of the side of life with 
w^iich the author first became acquainted in the 
growing city. The Story of Kcnnett is the cleverest 
and most artistic of the series ; a romance of the 
old-fashioned kind, and a true idyl of Pennsylvanian 
country-life in the early prime. Meantime, the au- 
thor's short stories, contributed to magazines, w^ere 
always fresh and good, as indeed were all his mis- 
cellaneous essays. The amount he threw off was re- 
markable. He wrote prefaces, edited books of travel 
and biograph}^, did everything a man of letters could 
do, with cheerfulness and facility. His prose was 
simple, clear, good English, if not great. Upon the | 
whole, his literary criticisms seemed to me the ripest | 
and most valuable portion of his prose labor. In i 
them he was compact, learned, writing to the point, | 
and his opinions were just and good with regard to 
both the spirit and technique of a w^ork. In later 
years, his reviews were so catholic, sound of canon 
and exact in detail, as to be models ; and it became 
evident that he could have been a notable critic, had 



'''' Hannah 
Thurs- 
ioii,'" 1S63. 



"■John 
Godfrey's 
Fortiaie,'''' 
1S64. 



''The Sto- 
ry of Kc7i- 
7iett:'' 1866. 

" Joseph 
and His 
Friettd,^' 
1870. 

Shorter 
Tales, Es' 
says, etc- 



Sce "■Crit 
ical Es- 
says,''"' 
1S80. 



422 



BAYARD TAYLOR. 



See "■Stud- 
ies in Ger- 
man Lit- 
trature,^'' 
1879. 



*'■ Faust : 
Trans- 
lated, 
in the 
Original 
Metres:'' 
Parts I. 
%nd II. , 
1870-71. 



he devoted himself to criticism alone. He had abun- 
dant humor, and this, with his judicial faculty, and 
his talent for parody and burlesque, found play in 
the serio-comic papers which were collected a few 
years before his death, in a volume called The Echo 
Club. 

Few men, not excepting Lewes and Carlyle, have 
been so well informed as Taylor with respect to 
German literature. His lectures upon that subject 
were prepared originally as a university course. For 
years he was a student of Goethe and Schiller and 
their times, and it was the dream of his life to write 
their biography. To this end he made extended re- 
searches in Germany, and collected material under 
auspicious conditions. Had he lived to complete 
such a work, it would have been a masterpiece. In 
the midst of his labors, he was enabled to make a 
complete Enghsh translation of " Faust," in the orig- 
inal metres, and to supervise its publication. 

IV. 

The surprising rapidity with which the two parts 
of Faust were brought out, the original commentary 
and notes, the avowal that the editor had read all 
the translations and commentaries made in any lan- 
guage, were phenomena of that kind which some- 
times led people to distrust the thoroughness of Tay- 
lor's work. The scholarly character of this perform- 
ance is now well established. That to which more 
than one of his predecessors had given a lifetime, 
he apparently completed in three years. He had 
borne it in mind, however, for two decades, and it 
was his habit to think upon a task until able ta 
execute it at a dash and with great perfection. 



TRANSLATION OF 'FAUST? 



423 



The result was an advance upon any previous 
rendering of the entire work. The preface demon- 
strates that poetry sometimes absolutely requires a 
retention of die original metres for its translation. 
Illustrations of this are found in Freiligrath's perfect 
transcript of Scott's " Come as the wind comes," 
and in Strodtmann's fine " Es fallt der Strahl auf 
Burg und Thai," — the "Bugle-Song" of Tennyson. 
To me these seem extreme cases : in others the re- 
sult might be otherwise. A translator must choose 
the best method for the work in hand. It is doubt- 
ful whether the test w'ould apply equally well to 
each of several poets who differ among themselves 
as widely as Homer, Theocritus, and Pindar. 

The characteristics of Taylor's " Faust " are sym- 
pathetic quality, rapid poetic handling, absolute fidel- 
ity to the text. Now and then his realistic version 
of the first part has an unusual or quaint effect, 
detracting from its imaginative design. Hence some 
of the best portions are those not in rhyme, such 
as the Cathedral scene, where Margaret is harassed 
by the Evil Spirit : — 

" How otherwise was it, Margaret, 
When thou, still innocent — " 



The reg- 



which is reproduced with thrilling power 
ular verse also is well rendered, Goethe's " Dedica- 
tion " never having been so well given by any other 
translator. Its firm, sonorous stanzas are in harmony 
with Taylor's own manner and poetic feeling : — 

" Again ye come, ye hovering Forms ! I find ye, 
As early to my clouded sight ye shone ! 
Shall I attempt, this once, to seize and bind ye ? 
Still o'er my heart is that illusion thrown ? 
Ye crowd more near ! Then, be .he reign assigned ye, 
And sway me from your misty, snadowy zone ! 



The most 
poetic and 
scholarly 
version. 



Its method* 



The ''Ded- 
ication.'''' 



424 



BAYARD TAYLOR. 



Handling 
of the Sec- 
ond Part. 



Shelley. 



My bosom thrills, with youthful passion shaken, 
From magic airs that round your march awaken. 

^* And grasps me now a long-unwonted yearning 
For that serene and solemn Spirit-Land : 
My song, to faint ^olian murmurs turning, 
Sways like a harp-string by the breezes fanned. 
I thrill and tremble ; tear on tear is burning, 
And the stern heart is tenderly unmanned. 
What I possess, I see far distant lying. 
And what I lost grows real and undying." 

To the mystical and much disputed Second Part 
the Hneal method of translation is specially adapted, 
and serves to preserve the fantastic nature of the 
original. Taylor had the gift and knowledge which 
enabled him to succeed where others had failed. 
He felt his ability, and perhaps too readily estimated 
the greatness of this part by the difficulties he mas- 
tered. The best poet, other things being equal, is 
the best translator. Opinions may differ as to the 
merits of his handling of the First Part of " Faust," 
but with respect to that of the Second there is lit- 
tle question. It is unlikely that any great English 
poet soon will undertake to excel it. Carlyle could 
have made the venture, for he was essentially a 
poet, despite his outcry against verse, Shelley, had 
he essayed a complete version and made his studies 
accordingly, might have left us the ideal translation 
— for he was the ideal translator. His paraphrase 
of the " Hymn to Mercury " is, as Emerson would 
say, more original than the original. His overture 
of " Faust " is in some way more grand and raptur- 
ous than Taylor's. His " Walpurgis Night " is full 
of enchantment — too soon the waving ended of that 
magic wand. 

Taylor's notes and commentary are the best we 



'LARS: 



425 



have, learned and intelligible, equally marked by po- 
etic feeling and good sense. His critical views of 
the Second Part should be more authoritative than 
those of others less conversant with the subject and 
less truly poets. He approves of Lewes's state- 
ment : " I have little sympathy with that philosophy 
of art which consists in translating Art into Philos- 
ophy, and I trouble myself very little with ' consid- 
erations on the Idea.' " In disputed passages, he 
seeks for light from his master's other writings, 
rather than from German and English commenta- 
tors. The result of this course is excellent, and I 
do not believe that any other translator has so 
nearly reproduced both the text and spirit of Goe- 



the's life-long work. 



V. 



An art-poem, The Picture of St. yo/m, was published 
by Taylor some years after the appearance of " The 
Poet's Journal." His talent for drawing has been 
mentioned; he was exceedingly fond of art, and not a 
few of its votaries were his attached friends. The 
new poem was dedicated to this gentle brotherhood. 
Its theme may be termed the development of an ar- 
tist's powers through experience of the joy and suffer- 
ing of life. The tale is Italian, as regards both feeling 
and incident ; and the scene is laid in Italy and the 
Alps. There are four books, of stanzas Avhich seem a 
variation upon the ottava rima. The poet spent much 
time upon this work, and it has many graceful pas- 
sages. But as a fresh and original conception and a 
charming piece of workmanship, I prefer Lars^ the 
only sustained poem in narrative form which he sub- 
sequently composed. It is finely conceived, and exe- 
cuted in a style worthy of the conception — which 



Taylor'' s 
Xotes on 
Faust. 



"■The Pic- 
ture of St. 
John:' 
1 866. 



'■'■Lars : a 
Pastoral 
cj Xor. 
tuay,'''' 
1873. 



426 



BAYARD TAYLOR. 



« Home 

Pastorals, 

Ballads., 

and 

Lyrics,''^ 

1875. 



could not always be said of Taylor's works. In 
" Lars " he took a subject quite within his powers, 
and realized his ideal. The scenes change from the 
Norwegian coast to the Quaker borders of the Dela- 
ware, and the author thoroughly understood the land- 
scape, manners, and sentiment of the two regions. 
The atmosphere is, by turns, fragrant with the balsam 
of Norseland firs, and thymy with the smell of new- 
mown fields across the western sea. A contrast is 
drawn between the half-savage habit of the Norse-folk 
and the placid religious quality of our pastoral mid- 
land settlements. The combat with knives between 
the rival Norsemen, Lars and Per, is a virile piece of 
work. Less Tennysonian and even more poetic are 
the idyls of Norwegian cottage life, which precede this 
scene. This blank -verse poem is a delightful pro- 
duction ; we have no idyl of similar length, except 
" Evangeline," that equals it in finish and interest. 

A subsequent collection of miscellaneous pieces — 
the Home Pastorals., to some of which I have referred 
— was made by the poet. Four contemplative poems 
of the seasons, as observed from the porches of Cedar- 
croft, are excellent of their kind, and have been under- 
valued ; they are in English hexameter verse, for 
which Taylor had a good ear, and only narrative 
pieces in that measure obtain a popular reading. To 
me they seem wise, beautiful, true to nature ; resem- 
bling in ease and freshness Clough's " Bothie," and 
very faithful to the scenery and sentiments of the 
Pennsylvanian border. This book also contains some 
of the poet's best ballads ; but has other lyrics quite 
uneven in merit. It is notable for three of the odes 
(exhibiting his taste for sweeping Pindaric measures) 
which he recited upon various public occasions in his 
later years. 



'THE NATIONAL ODE.' 



427 



The Goethe ode and the one delivered at Gettys- 
burg are manly and heroic poems. The Shakespeare 
ode is less successful. In a crowning lyrical effort, he 
had as wide an audience as poet could desire. He 
was addressing not only the assemblage in Indepen- 
dence Square, on the 4th of July, 1876, but millions of 
his countrymen, — in truth, the reading world. It was 
a fine occasion, and all his ambition was aroused. 
What poet ever had a more historic opportunity? 
Should the verse of all his contemporaries be forgot- 
ten, the first Centennial Ode will be revived and re- 
examined. 

The National Ode was not unworthy of the occasion, 
from a conventional point of view. It was sonorous, 
patriotic, mindful of our traditions, full of dignity and 
rhetorical power. As such it was received. But it 
was not the one new, bold, original production, which 
appeals alike to the wise and the unlearned, rouses 
the imagination, imprints itself upon the memory of 
all who read it, and becomes a lasting portion of 
national literature. Marvell's ode " On the Return 
of the Lord Protector " and Lowell's " Commemora- 
tion Ode " are poems of this kind ; in sooth, Taylor's 
effort, coming after the latter, demanded all his cour- 
age. I remember urging him to adopt some regular 
stanzaic form, however complicated, or else to write 
his poem in blank-verse or rhymed-heroic, — either of 
these measures being more likely than the irregular 
Pindaric to touch and hold the popular heart. It 
seemed to me that the simplest vehicle would best 
convey, on such an occasion, the noblest thought. His 
adverse decision was guided partly by precedent, more 
by his instinctive sense of an ability to compose and 
recite musically his Pindaric verse. He did deliver 
his ode with superb effect, and felt the occasion in 



"■The Na^ 
tiotuil 
Ode,'' 
1876. 



428 



BAYARD TAYLOR. 



Dramatic 
Writings. 



'■'The 
Prophet : 
a Trage- 
dy^' 1874. 



The dra- 
ma, po- 
9try''s 



every fibre of his mould. Americans refer without 
distrust to this poem, but few recall its phrases ; and 
it must be acknowledged that even of Lowell's elab- 
orate odes only one has really succeeded in fastening 
itself upon the public mind. 

VI. 

One more division of Taylor's manifold productions 
remains for consideration, — ■ to wit, his dramatic works. 
Of these, two are philosophical studies cast in dramatic 
form ; the intervening one, however, is a five-act play, 
the interest being human rather than speculative. 

The Prophet has certain claims to attention. This 
work, a closet-drama perhaps as easily adapted for the 
stage as one or two of Browning's, was an attempt to 
treat dramatically a modern and peculiar American 
theme, and to make what could be made of it. Hints 
are taken from the early history of Mormonism, but 
the central figure, instead of being a vulgar impostor 
like Joseph Smith, is a simple and pious young farmer, 
such a man as the author's own county might have 
produced ; intelligent withal, but the victim of the re- 
ligious ecstasy that comes to one without knowledge 
of books and the world. The devices of shrewder 
comrades and the jealousy of women unite to deceive 
him, and to persuade him, by signs and miracles, of 
his prophetic mission. The incidents follow naturally ; 
the scenes being laid first in New England, then in 
the far West, whither the Prophet and his followers 
have gone to found a sacred city. Internal plots and 
external foes bring about a catastrophe, ending with 
the death of the hero of the play. 

The highest form of poetry is the drama, for it in- 
cludes all other fortns^ and should combine them in 



DRAMATIC WORKS. 



429 



their greatest excellence. At its best it is the supreme 
flower of the literature of any nation, and demands a 
poet's rarest and most comprehensive genius. It 
scarcely proffers a iliethod which he can fully master, 
late in life, after years of lyrical or idyllic minstrelsy. 
The dramatic instinct must be born in him : a£:ain, his 
formative period must find him in a region where a 
dramatic tendency already fills the air. Otherwise his 
work as a playwright, like that of Tennyson or Long- 
fellow, must be accomplished by an artificial effort, 
and will lack the touch that makes the whole world 
kin. Even Browning, with his immense dramatic re- 
sources, early found a greater hindrance than his own 
subjectivity in the non-sympathetic spirit of his people 
and time. " The Prophet " failed, in view of its au- 
thor's theme and purpose, not solely from his lack of 
early dramatic practice, but from causes which hardly 
could be overcome. Such a plot might be treated 
idealistically, by giving the w^idest range to imagina- 
tion, fearing no extravagance, creating one's own facts 
and atmosphere, and the result might be a great dra- 
matic poem if not an acting drama; or it might be 
treated realistically, — the course which Taylor natu- 
rally pursued. To insure success by the latter mode, 
the time and events of a drama must be poetic in 
themselves. In this story of our own time, there is, 
perforce, a lack of the illusive and entrancing atmos- 
phere of the far-away past. That which is too modern 
and familiar seems commonplace. The time may 
come when as much shall be made of the Mormon 
episode as of the traditions of the Druses or of John 
of Leyden ; at present it furnishes a store of clap-trap 
to melodramatic playwrights who derive from it sub- 
stantial gains. Taylor drew his personages with skill, 
but their unheroic character was against the passion of 



highest 
/ortn. 



Modes of 
treahnent. 



430 



BAYARD TAYLOR, 



Cp. " Vic- 
toriaji 
Poets " .• 
t- S3- 



"■The 
Masque of 
the Godsf'^ 
1872. 



A poet 0/ 

noble 

ideals. 



the play. The work illustrates the importance of cer- 
tain canons. First, nobility of theme has much to do 
with the value of art ; secondly, realism is not the 
chief end in matters of design. There is truth — and 
truth ; the truth of what is or has been, and the truth 
of what may be. 

The lack of interest felt in " The Prophet " deterred 
its author from further experiments of the kind. His 
other dramas are purely ideal. The Masque of the 
Gods presents that side of his nature which was most 
exalted and aspiring. His religious temper, it has 
been seen, was bred under other influences than those 
which restrict the faith of many poets. He was a be- 
liever in direct inspiration, but a questioner of revela- 
tion. The creed of the Progressive Quakers was lib- 
eral and humane, and the boy grew up to regard men 
of all races as his brethren, and every form of worship 
as acceptable to an Unknown God whom he himself 
addressed in the spirit of Pope's " Universal Prayer." 
This sense was strengthened by his travels and studies, 
and his religion became broader than any man's the- 
ology. " The Masque of the Gods " — a title with a 
tinge of quaintness below the dignity of the subject — 
is a drama of three dialogues, managed in a severe 
and classical fashion. It approaches as near to the 
highest grade as intellect, eloquence, and fervent glow, 
— it was written in four days, " almost at white heat," 
— ^can lift such a poem. What it lacks is the uncon- 
scious flight into that empyrean where the wings move 
without sound and touches of flame hover at the tips 
of the pinions. The conception is vast, daring, — far 
more imaginative than its working out. 

This drama, which Taylor rated high among his 
productions, and which is in every sense an expression 
of his devotion to the nobler forms of song, renders 



'PRINCE DEUKALION,' 



431 



it possible for one to assert that a writer may be judged 
somewhat by his ideals, and that, so far as this mode 
of judgment is concerned, its author held a significant 
place in the group of American poets. It was the 
precursor — the overture, we may say — to the work 
that was his swan-song, the larger drama which he 
lived to complete, and of w4iich a fair broad copy 
reached him but a day before the lyre dropped from his 
hand forever. " Of his last work," wTote his bereaved 
wife, — " sei?i Sc/nva?iefi Gesang, as I call it, — as I 
would call it in my mind involuntarily, long before I 
knew he was deadly ill, he only saw one copy, and 
that of the English edition." 

A strange interest belongs to the drama of Fri?ice 
Deukalion. The poet deferred his serious work upon 
the life of Goethe, that he might be sure of complet- 
ing this one poem which he strove to make his best. 
Attention may be directed to the artistic skill with 
wdiich it is composed, to the sounding qualities of the 
main body of its verse, and to the varying interludes 
marked by the author's lyrical felicities in their ma- 
turest range. Even here his expression retains a man- 
nerism which grew out of the limited vocabulary pre- 
vailing when he learned his art in youth. Certain 
words and effects are of too frequent recurrence ; but, 
allowing for all this, " Prince Deukalion " will bear 
examination for its excess of rhythmical beauty. 
America has produced few poems so admirable for 
richness and variety of measures. 

The subject is one that lay near Taylor's heart, 
and to him was the most elevating of poetic themes 
— to wit, the progress of mankind, from the ignominy 
and suffering belonging to the youth of the world, to 
the golden age of the future. The thought and treat- 
ment of the drama are entirely characteristic of the 



His swanp 

SOflg. 



'■'• Prince 
Deuka- 
lion: a 
Lyrical 
Draina^^ 



Rhyth- 
mical 
beauty. 



A charac 

teristic 
ilteyne. 



432 



BAYARD TAYLOR. 



AgathoTCs 
avowal. 



author. The early portion is unquestionably fine. Pas- 
sages in the middle and latter sections show a falling 
off, due, it may be, to the languor of illness and to the 
pressure of the instinct which made the poet hasten 
to the completion of his task, but at the close he again 
rose to a noble height. It is easy to select an ex- 
ample of the vigorous handling of the structural verse. 
His Poet declares : — 

" I am a voice, and cannot more be still 
Than some high tree that takes the whirlwind's stress 
Upon the summit of a lonely hill. 
Be thou a wooing breeze, my song is fair ; 
Be thou a storm, it pierces far and shrill, 
And grows the spirit of the starless air: 
Such voices were, and such must ever be, 
Omnipotent as love, unforced as prayer, 
And poured round Life as round its isles the sea ! " 

In the fourth act, the words of Agathon are an 
expression of the sentiment and hopeful philosophy 
which animated Taylor's whole career : — 

"But I accept — even all this conscious life 
Gives in its fullest measure — gladness, health, 
Clean appetite, and wholeness of my claim 
To knowledge, beauty, aspiration, power ! 
Joy follows action, here ; and action bliss, 
Hereafter ! " 

But at last, and even here, it seemed as if — to 
change the line of John Webster — the years of this 
loyal and eager poet had felicities too many. His 
rest was not to be that upon which he counted. Had 
he drawn his own horoscope it could not have ap- 
peared more perfect. He went again to the land of 
his earliest pilgrimage, encouraged with honors and 
affection, and with the best opportunities for the pro- 
duction of a work to which his own choice and the 
desire of the entire republic of letters strongly im- 



THOUGHTS ON HIS CAREER. 



433 



pelled him. Hereafter, he was to have cahn and lei- 
sure. But within the year his soul was required of him, 
and one more broken shaft was added to the endless 
colonnade by which we testify to the incompleteness 
of this our earthly life, and express the pity of it,, 



Shortly after Taylor's death, a fellow-writer, who 
knew him well, spoke to me of his literary career. 
"A man so aspiring and sagacious," this critic said, 
" could be satisfied with nothing less than the highest 
achievement, the soundest professional judgment in 
his favor." Recognizing the point thus made, I would 
not accept it as a test of his genius. It seemed to 
me that it was his fortune, however wide his popular 
reputation, to be underestimated by his professional 
compeers. His gift was genuine and inherent, but it 
became too much diffused ; he strove to survey too 
large a precinct, and it was surprising how far, in more 
than one direction, he made his lines extend. With 
all his facility and purpose, he found himself in a too 
arduous struggle between the duty of the hour and 
the still higher work fashioned after " the pattern 
which was shewed him in the Mount." He set him- 
self to carry out an almost impossible plan of life. 
His manliness in this and other respects we all con- 
cede. During his experience of a time and region 
which made Poe a weakling, — almost an Ishmaelite, 
— with what pluck and heartiness Taylor faced the 
situation, until it seemed as if the ver}^ god of strength 
took pleasure in befriending him ! After all, he had 
some right to count upon length of years, and to shape 
his plan accordingly. He grew in taste and judgment 
as he grew older, and even his devotion of so much 
time to hack-work was not without its requitals. He 
led a singularly happy life throughout, and the cloud 
28 



Died in 
Berlin, 
Germany^ 
Dec. 19, 
1S7S. 



Fi?ial con^ 

sidera- 

tions. 



434 



BAYARD TAYLOR. 



foretokening its close was but of brief duration. He 
was fond of festivals, of joy ; he had honor, love, and 
loyal " troops of friends." More was given to him 
than was taken away, and his memory is something to 
dwell upon with pleasure, not with pain. The volumes 
of his song are left to us, the bequest of that which 
he thought the choicest product of his years. No one 
who would acquaint himself with American poetry can 
overlook Bayard Taylor's share of it Those who 
would understand its growth, or predict its future, 
must bear in mind the generation for which he wrote 
and the story of his efforts and environment. 



CHAPTER XII. 



THE OUTLOOIC 



IN writing upon the leaders of American song, I 
have sought to make our various studies as com- 
prehensive as possible within due bounds. That they 
might be both critical and sympathetic, and afford 
new illustrations of the poetic principle and the tem- 
perament of poets, it has been my effort to approach 
the subject of each from his own ground, — to com- 
prehend his motive and judge him at his best j at 
the same time, to see where he has failed of that 
standard and of the true spirit of ideal expression. 
Such an effort requires to be taken as a whole. Iso- 
lated phrases, and even sections, may be misconstrued 
as unfair stricture or, on the other hand, as if biased 
by personal considerations. Yet, in the course of 
each study, I have tried to draw a just portrait, and 
so to analyze the work of its original as to obtain at 
least an approximately correct resultant. 

For this final chapter, — relating to various persons 
and questions of the time, and necessarily less cohe- 
sive and animate than those which it supplements, — 
I would ask that its parts be weighed together, if at 
all. It has a distinct purpose, — to glance at the ex- 
isting condition of our poetry, and to speculate con- 
cerning the near future. Not to prophesy — we 
scarcely can forecast next month's weather from the 
numberless shifting currents of to-day. Yet one may 



RetrospeC' 
tive. 



Design of 
this cJiap- 
ter. 



436 



A CRY OF FOREBODING. 



Cp. " Vic- 
torian Po- 
ets " •• 
f. 234. 



Recent 
forebod- 
ings. 



hopefully surmise, for example, that a dull spell will 
not last beyond all reason and experience. The past 
teaches us what signs indicate the change, — where 
blue sky will first appear, — - and that, if the wind 
"backs," or proves fickle, a brightening will be tem- 
porary and delusive. In the mood of a cautious 
weather-sage, then, let us examine the late reports 
from the signal-stations that together show the prob» 
abilities. In reviewing the poetry of England, the 
general drift was indicated more plainly by the choir 
at large than by the solos of a few striking and in- 
dependent voices. 

I. 

When some of our elder poets, their careers felic- 
itously rounded, were taken from us, there soon arose 
a cry of foreboding. Who, it was asked, are to oc- 
cupy the places of Bryant, Longfellow, Emerson ? 
What younger men can equal the work executed by 
those pioneers when the latter were of corresponding 
age ? A period of decline has been predicted. It 
may be noted, as we seek to determine whether the 
prediction is well based, that a similar cry is heard 
from across the sea. The work of Tennyson and the 
Brownings, in their prime, is contrasted with that of 
their juniors, and critics are not boastful as to the 
promise of another saengerfest. I venture to recall 
that ten years ago I saw the beginning of a poetic 
dusk, and expressed a belief in its temporary contin- 
uance. It is now generally perceived and lamented \ 
nevertheless it seems to me that it is near an end. 
and that we may begin to look for a new day. If 
this is to differ from the last, — if we who enjoyed 
the old fashion shall find it hard to accustom our 
selves to the new, — the young will speedily interpret 



DISTRACTING INFLUENCES. 



437 



it for us. Their estimate of relative values will have 
its own gauge. 

The rise of Poetry in America, its first noteworthy 
and somewhat original endeavor, was clearly marked, 
and in the main coincident wdth that of the Victorian 
School abroad. Before long, our poetry took its place 
with standard literature; its authors won the interest, 
even the affection, of an attentive public. The close 
of the term involved may not have been so clear to 
us. Literary periods shift with mingled sounds, like 
those of bands following one another at intervals in 
a procession. But, as in the case of the parallel term 
abroad, it w^as defined sufficiently for us now to look 
back and recognize it. The influences to which was 
due a diversion of interest, and which brought poetic 
aims and methods into doubt, may be briefly recapit- 
ulated. They include all that we have seen prevail- 
ing throughout Christendom and resulting from its 
accelerated evolution of knowledge and energy : the 
radical change in the course of imagination, enforced 
by the advance of science, — the disturbance of tra- 
dition and convictions, — the leap from romance to 
realism. We must allow, too, for the diviersion of 
genius to material conquests, adventure, the creation 
of fortunes ; and for the growth of journalism, and of 
prose fiction answering to the demands of the time. 
All the resulting influences are fully as dynamic here 
as in the Old World, and some of them far more so. 
But other factors, peculiar to this country, must not 
be overlooked. The civil war was a general absorb- 
ent at the crisis w^hen a second group of poets began 
to form. Their generation pledged itself to the most 
heroic struggle of the century The conflict not only 
checked the rise of a new school, but was follow^ed 
by a time of languor in which the songs of Apollo 



Duration 
and close 
o/ ourjirsl 
poetic 
tervi. 



Recapittt- 
lation of 
distracting 
ifijliiences. 
Cp. "-Vic- 
toriafi Po- 
ets " ; 
PP 7-29- 



See pp. 17, 
26, 27. 



Tlie JVar 



«8 



THE PUBLIC APPETITE. 



Pre'iinp- 
Hon. 



A new pub- 
lic taste. 



See pp. 54- 
58. 



4 hrief 
wrvey 



seemed trivial to those who had listened to the shout 
of Mars. A manly reaction from the taste for rhet- 
oric and sentiment which existed before the war de- 
generated into the indifferentism lately affected by 
our clever youths. Those whose lyrical instinct sur- 
vived through all conditions, and still impelled them 
to sing, found themselves subject to a novel disad- 
vantage. The favorite senior bards were still in voice ; 
their very longevity, fitting and beautiful as it was, re- 
strained the zeal and postponed the opportunities of 
pupils who held them in honor. Our common and 
becoming reverence prevented both the younger writ- 
ers and the people from suspecting that these veter- 
ans were running in grooves and supplying little new ; 
finally, when this was realized, and there was a more 
open field, it became evident that the public was sa- 
tiated with verse and craved a change, not merely of 
poets, but to some new form of imaginative literature. 
Original genius will find an outlet through all hin- 
drances ; be the air as it may, its flight will be the 
eagle's ; but it will be apt, at such a time, to take 
some other direction than that of its predecessors. 
All in all, the subsequent incitement to lyrical effort 
was not so effective, nor was the opening so clear, as 
in the period that favored the rise of Longfellow and 
his compeers. 

In the course of these studies I have referred at 
some length to a few poets next succeeding those 
veterans, — some who now, but for the regard shown 
them by younger contestants, would scarcely realize 
how surely they are becoming veterans themselves. 
Thus age succeeds to age, and still Poesy, — 

"blazoned as on heaven's immortal noon, 
. . . leads generations on." 

It only remains for us to take an outlook, and make 



PRELIMINARY SURVEY. 



439 



note of what poetic activity is discoverable at the 
present time. With respect to my near associates, 
and to the increasing circle of fresh recruits, whose 
chances are all before them, I repeat my statement 
that it would be out of taste and purpose for me to 
assume the functions of a critical censor or appraiser. 
The situation can be studied, and some conjecture 
made of the future, upon a rapid (and in the main 
uncritical) summary of what a representative number 
of these have done and are doing, and I do not 
think our conclusions can be so well reached in any 
other way. 

II. 

Whittier and Holmes, the two oldest survivors of 
their group, find their audience still extending with 
the rapid spread of culture in this land. Their eyes 
are scarcely dimmed, and their natural strength serves 
them for periodic flights of song. Lowell's apparent 
retirement in favor of younger writers, though doubt- 
less only temporary, is the one courtesy they desire 
him to forego. From Whitman, more picturesque than 
ever, we have now and then some passing, half-broken, 
yet harmonic strain, striving to capture the substance 
of things seen and unseen. I have written already of 
Taylor, Stoddard, Boker, Trowbridge, and their com- 
rades, wdth whom our poetry began to show less of 
the ethical and polemic fervor that brought their pred- 
ecessors into repute. No new cause required the 
lifting up of hands, and they meditated the muse 
from simple love of beauty and song, Stoddard, al- 
though a hard-worked man of letters, has been true 
to his early vows, and adds to our songs of summer 
in the autumn of his life. Occasionally also he writes, 
with his old finish and tranquil power, one of those 



noiv req- 
uisite. 



Its cfiaY' 
acter. 



Emeriti. 



Next in 
age. See 
Chap. ILy 
etc. 



Stoddard^ 



440 



WINTER. —ALDRICH. 



A younger 
^roup. 



Wtlliatn 
Winter : 
1836- 



Thomas 
Bailey 
A Idrich '. 
1836- 



Peauty of 
\is verse 
%nd prose. 



sustained and characteristic blank - verse poems in 
which his faculty is at its highest. Of poets a decade 
younger, Hayne, Aldrich, Winter, Piatt, Howells, and 
a few others, still remain. It was their lot to begin 
at just the time when the country had forsworn peace 
and its pipings ; but they none the less took heart, 
and did good service in keeping our minstrel line un-= 
broken through good and evil days alike. 

Winter's extreme poetic temperament, and his loy- 
alty to an ideal, have made his frequent sketches of 
travel very charming, and have imparted to his dra- 
matic criticisms the grace and proportion for which 
they are distinguished. The melody, ease, and sin- 
cere feeling of his personal tributes and occasional 
pieces for delivery render them quite unique. The 
poem read at the dedication of the monument to Poe 
is an elevated production. His best lyrics have caught 
the spirit of the early English muse. 

To Aldrich, now in his sunny prime, — the most 
pointed and exquisite of our lyrical craftsmen, — justly 
is awarded a place at the head of the younger art- 
school. He is a poet of inborn taste, a votary of the 
beautiful, and many of his delicately conceived pieces, 
that are unexcelled by modern work, were composed 
in a ruder time, and thus a forecast of the present 
technical advance. They illustrate the American in- 
stinct which unites a Saxon honesty of feeling to that 
artistic subtilty in which the French surpass the world. 
Though successful in a few poems of a more heroic 
cast, his essential skill and genius are found in briefer 
lyrics comparable to faultless specimens of the an- 
tique graver's art. Such pieces as the " Palabras 
Carinosas " and the lines " On an Intaglio Head of 
Minerva " have a high-bred quality that still keeps 
them at the head of our vers de societe ; nor is theit 



FAWCETT. — GILDER. — DE KAY, 



441 



author dependent for his effect on novel and ehibo- 
rate forms. Apparently spontaneous, they are per- 
fected with the touch of a Gautier. His quatrains 
and trifles expressive of fleeting moods rank with the 
best of our time. Aldrich's restraint in verse is a 
notable contrast to the sudden wit and fancy of his 
speech ; as a writer, he never has stood in need of 
the injunction, — 

"O Poet, then forbear 

The loosely sandalled verse, 
Choose rather thou to wear 

The buskin straight and terse." 

His shorter tales and sketches are finished like so 
many poems in prose, sparklingly original, and de- 
lightful for the airy by-play, the refined 7iim7iccs, of 
a captivating literary style. 

Fawcett's verse displays tendencies which class him 
with the art-school, and an inclination to profit by 
the Gallic taste and motive. The poems in his two 
volumes are selected, I presume, from a copious store, 
as he has been from youth a prolific WTiter. In 
Fantasy and Passion were many cabinet pictures in 
rhyme, drawn with fastidious care, and an occasional 
lyric, like " The Meeting," upon a w^eird theme and 
suggestively wrought. The leading pieces in Sofig 
a7id Sto)'y have fewer mannerisms, — a less fanciful, 
a freer and more imaginative, treatment. Mr. Faw- 
cett's versatility leads him to essay almost every form 
of inventive, satirical, and critical literature, and as 
a playwright he has made not the least successful 
of his ventures. Two of our prominent New^ York 
authors seem, aside from their professional work as 
journalists, to have devoted themselves without re- 
serve to poetry. Their characteristics are very dis-j 



Edgar 
Fawcett i 
1847- 



Gilder and 
de Kay, 



442 



LYRIC, IDYLLIC, DESCRIPTIVE, 



R ichard 
Watson 
Gilder : 
1844- 



Charles 
de Kay : 



George 

A mold ' 
1834-65. 

John 
Ayhnere 
Dorgan : 
X836-67. 

George 
Parsons 
Lathrop : 
1851- 

Hjalmar 
Hjorth 
Boyesen : 
1848- 



similar. Gilder, whose vein is so unlike that of Mr. 
Aldrich, vies with him in artistic conscientiousness. 
There is no slovenly work in T/ie New Day and The 
Poet and his Master ; each is a cluster of flawless 
poems, — the earlier verse marked by the mystical 
beauty, intense emotion, and psychological distinc- 
tions, of the select illuminati. He appears to have 
studied closely, besides the most ideal English verse, 
the Italian sonnets and canzoni which ever deeply 
impress a poet of exquisite feeling. An individual 
tone dominates his maturer lyrical efforts ; his aim 
is choice and high, as should be that of one who 
decides upon the claims of others, and at his age 
there are fine things left for him to do. Charles de 
Kay is also conspicuous for height of aim, and cer- 
tainly for a most resolute purpose. In these days 
it is bracing to see a man of his ability in earnest 
as a poet. It would be premature to judge of the 
strange, affluent, and broadly handled Visions, Ni7n- 
rod and Esther, at this near view, or until completed 
by the final section of their trilogy. Hesperus and 
the Poems of Barnaval show his impassioned and more 
subjective moods, and his resources for a prodigal 
display of varied, uneven, but often strongly effective 
lyrical work. 

The deaths of Arnold and Dorgan, at ages when 
practice-work ended and individual traits began to 
appear, stilled two voices of no little promise. Among 
our Northern poets there are some whose verse is 
the expression of their choicest impulses rather than 
the most substantial portion of their literary outcome. 
Lathrop's too infrequent lyrics give token of sensi- 
tive feeling and a beautiful poetic vein. Professor 
Boyesen's verse, like his prose, belongs so thoroughly 
to his adopted language, and is so fresh and classic 



AXD MEDITATIVE VERSE. 



443 



that we scarcely think of him as a Norwegian. The 
Oriental songs of Edward King are health)' and vir- 
ile, and add variety to our recent product. Sill, 
Benton, Dr. Powers, Weir Mitchell, Professor Beers, 
Riordan, S. H. Thayer, W. S. Shurtleff, McKay, Co- 
nant. Abbey, Duffield, Blood, Proudlit, Butterworth, 
Saltus, Tilton, the late Robert Weeks, among our 
writers of lyrical verse, represent widely different 
grades of motive and execution. Of the late Henry 
Work, that instinctive composer of songs (and their 
music) for the people, I have spoken elsewhere. Rob- 
ert Grant has a frolic talent for satire, and some- 
thing like that masterhood of current styles for which 
we still read Frere and Aytoun. Houghton's St. 
Olafs Kirk is a good romantic poem, in the Ten- 
nysonian manner, finished with much care. Maurice 
Thompson's Songs of Fair Weather are w^ell named; 
in breezy, out-of-door feeling he is a kinsman of 
Walter Mitchell, who wrote " Tacking Ship off Shore." 
It is chiefly through a close observation of nature 
that the influence of the elder poets, especially of 
Emerson, is prolonged by the new choir. Mo?ite Rosa, 
Nichols's long descriptive poem, is a not unworthy 
counterpart to The Brook — for which the late Dr. 
Wright is held in recollection. The transcendental 
mstmct, that follows upon Nature's elusive and spir- 1 
jtual trails, survives in the thoughtful lines of her j 
born communicant, John Albee, whose individuality is 
none the less apparent. Cheney's lyrics of nature and 
emotion have kindred yet distinct traits. " The Mod- 1 
ern Job," by Peterson, is an eccentric, but original j 
and suggestive work, and there are striking passages! 
in his minor poems. McKnight's volume of sonnets ; 
on " Life and Faith " is fraught widi poetic medita- ' 
tion. Montgomery and " Paul Hermes," the former 



Edward 

King- 

1848- 

{,See In- 
dex.) 



Robert 
Gra?tt : 
1S52- 

George 
M^'aah- 
ingion 
ir right 
Hojtgh- 
ion : 1850- 

James 
lifaiirice 
Thomp- 
son : I 844- 
Walter 
Mitchell : 
1826- 
Starr 
Hoyt 
Nichols : 
1834- 

U^'right : 
see p. 52. 

John Al- 
bee: 1833- 

John 
Vance 
Cheney : 
1848- 

Hetiry 
Peterson '. 
1S18- 

George 
Mc- 

Knlght : 
1840^ 



444 



FEMALE POETS. 



George 
Edgar 
Mont- 
gomery : 
1856- 

IVilliam 

Roscoe 

Thayer. 

{"■Paul 

Hernies'''): 

1859- 



John 
Boyle 
O'Reilly: 
1844- 

Robert 
Dzvyer 
Joyce : 
1813-83. 

Maurice 
Francis 
Egan : 
1852- 

{See In- 
dex.) 

Fejnale 
■poets: see 
p. 50. 



Their rel- 
ative ex- 
cellence. 



avowedly, are inspired by the marvels of the new 
learning, and find no surer tonic for the imagination 
than modern scientific discovery. Emerson's song 
was a verification of Wordsworth's faith in the iden- 
tity of philosopher and poet. Our future imagery 
will shape itself unconsciously, without much need of 
a poet's wilful effort, and will be his adjunct and ve- 
hicle rather than the object of his aim. Montgom- 
ery's command of rhythm is finely evident, and the 
young author of Hermes seems to have good service 
within his power. 

Boyle O'Reilly attests his Irish blood by the verve 
and readiness of his ballads. He may be more justly 
claimed as an American than the late Dr. Joyce, 
whose Deirdre fulfilled the promise of a bard who in 
youth wrote the "Ballads of Irish Chivalry." Among 
other and recent Celtic minstrels of this greater Ire- 
land, besides Maurice Egan, a sweet and true poet, 
have been the gallant O'Brien and, Halpine, John 
Savage, McDermott, — and Father Ryan, whose emo- 
tional strains reach a larger audience than that which 
more studied verse is wont to gain. 

A Scotch critic, whose resources as our literary 
historian are confined mostly to periods before the 
civil war, repeats an old fling at " the plague of Amer- 
ican poetesses." This vieux gar f on of letters, if ac- 
quainted with their work, might beseech us, like Bene- 
dick, not to flout at him for what he had said against 
them. Our daughters of song outnumber those in 
England, and some of them, like some of their breth- 
ren, have thin voices ; but it is just as true that 
much genuine poetry is composed by others, and that, 
while we have none whose notes equal those of at 
least one Englishwoman, in average merit they are 
not behind their fair rivals. Their lyrics, sonnets. 



A MARKED ADVANCE. 



445 



ballads, are feminine and spontaneous, and often 
highly artistic. To be sure, our aspirants of either 
sex are attempting few works of invention ; where all 
are sonneteering, it is not strange that women should 
hold their own. Yet their advance in discipline and 
range is apparent also in novels and other prose- 
work; they know more than of old, their thought is 
deeper, their feeling more healthy. The morale of 
their verse is always elevating; in other respects it 
fluently adapts itself to the conventions of the day. 

Among these sweet-voiced singers, to some of whom 
I have alluded heretofore, Miss Larcom, with her or- 
chard notes, well retains her popularity. Mrs. Cooke 
and Mrs. Stoddard are too seldom heard, — each so 
original, so true in verse and prose to characteristic 
types. The former's poetry always has been admired 
for motive and execution ; Mrs. Stoddard's, though 
less in amount, has the condensed power and vivid 
coloring that render it difficult to mistake the source 
of anything from her hand. The verse of the brill- 
iant and devoted '' H. H." (the sense of whose loss 
is fresh upon us) is more carefully finished, though 
perhaps it sings the less for its union of intellectu- 
ality with a subtile feeling whose intenseness is real- 
ized only by degrees. Her pieces, mostly in a single 
key, and that grave and earnest, have won the just 
encomiums of select critics, but certainly lack the vari- 
ety of mood which betokens an inborn and always 
dominant poetic faculty. Mrs. Spofford's various lyrics 
are rich in cadence ; she has a fine choice of measures, 
and always interests us both with her theme and its 
treatment. Her passion is genuine, and unusual re- 
sources of diction, color, effect, are brought to play 
in her poems. iVlrs. Fields, the most objective of 
these writers, veils her personality, except as it be- 



A n ad- 
vance 
fioted. 



Lucy Lar- 
com. 

Rose Ter- 
ry Cooke. 

Elizabeth 
Drew 
Barstow 
Stoddard. 



Helen Ma- 
ria Fiske 
Jacksofi. 



Harriet 
Elizabeth. 
Prescott 
Spofford, 



A nnie 

Adatni 

Fields, 



446 



FEMALE POETS. 



comes revealed by a free rhythmical method, and an 
obvious inclination toward the classical and antique. 
The zest, the enchanting glamour, of Northern coast- 
life are known to Celia Thaxter, our daughter of the 
isles. Her sprayey stanzas give us the dip of the sea- 
bird's wing, the foam and tangle of ocean, varied in- 
terpretations of clambering sunrise mists and even- 
ing's fiery cloud above the main. Mrs. Allen, Mrs, 
Mapes Dodge, Mrs. Moulton, Nora Perry, Miss Cool- 
brith and Miss Shinn of California, are natural sing- 
ers, in their several degrees. The stanzas of Mrs. 
Moulton and Mrs. Dodge are marked by charming 
fancy, and always tender and sweet. Miss Perry is 
an instinctive melodist, with a sure ear for the tell- 
ing, original refrains that heighten the effect of such 
lyrics as " Cressid " and " Riding Down." 

Our best-known Western poetess, Mrs. Piatt, though 
often obscure, has traits resembling those of Miss 
Rossetti, — a vivid consciousness of the mystery of 
life and death, a conjuring indirectness of style, and 
a gift, which she shares with Mrs. Dodge, of seeing 
into the hearts of children. She will not, however, be 
rightly measured by one who reads the wrong volume 
of her poems, or the wrong poem. Miss Phelps's 
deeply religious nature, warring with its own doubts, 
leads her on adventurous paths. That she is essen- 
tially a poet was evident from her prose, long before 
she made a collection of verse. She is the modern 
vine from a Puritan stock, subject to inherited ten- 
dencies, but yielding blossoms of feminine grace and 
aspiration. The names of the late Mrs. Hudson, of 
Mrs. Bradley, " Marian Douglas," Mrs. Sangster, Miss 
Bushnell, Miss Woolsey, Mrs. Searing, Miss Bates, 
Mrs. Smith, Miss Bloede, Miss de Vere, Ella Dietz, 
Miss Proctor, Mrs. Rollins, Miss Osgood, and Miss 



Celia 

Leighton 

Tltaxter- 



Mrs. 
Moulton^ 
Mrs. 
Dodge., 
Miss Per- 
ry., and 
others. 
{See In- 
dex.) 



Sarah 
Morgan 
Bryati 
Piatt. 



Elizabeth 

Stuart 

Phelps. 



[See In- 
iex.) 



THEIR CHARACTERISTICS. 



447 



Cone, may be cited in a list of tliose whose songs are 
pleasantly familiar. Miss Lazarus, to whose transla- 
tions of Heine I have referred elsewhere, is on her 
own ground in rendering the Hebrew poets of old 
Spain ; her minor pieces are written with a firm hand, 
and her tragedy, 77/6' Dance of Death, is a work of 
much power. " Owen Innsley " has gained the favor 
of those who care for poetry of an artistic type, and 
Miss Thomas, that delightful confidante, yet betrayer, 
of the secrets of the nymphs and muses, has given 
us a volume of great beauty. The So?igs a?id Lyrics 
of Miss Hutchinson, and even more her later pieces, 
striking for their melody, imagination, and unique 
sense of design, assure us that if she allots to poetry 
the devotion that has enriched her work in other 
fields, its very greenest wreath is at her command. 
There are still younger voices that give us fresh 
music — like Miss Guiney's, or, like those of the Good- 
ale sisters, artless ditties of the woods and fields, and 
from which maturer notes are not unlikely to be 
heard. 

In the South, we have Mrs. Preston's works, of an 
ambitious cast and strengthened by dramatic pur- 
pose and expression. Like Mrs. Webster in England, 
she may be called a pupil of Browning. Local color, 
and much suggestion of the far Southern atmosphere 
and sentiment, are found in the volumes of Mrs. 
Townsend, of Louisiana. 

These poets mostly sing for expression's sake, and 
therefore without affectation. They often excel the 
sterner sex in perception of the finer details of life 
and nature. The critic would be a renegade who, 
after paying his tribute to feminine genius in England, 
should not recognize with satisfaction what has been 
achieved by his own countrywomen. They have their 



Etnnta 
Lazarus. 



Lucy 

White 

Jennisoti. 

Edith Ma- 
tilda 
Thomas. 

Ellen 

Mackay 

Hutchin- 



Margaret 

Ju7ikin 

Preston. 



Mary A sh- 
hy Towtt- 
scfid. 
{"■Xarif- 



A-n 



448 



RECENT PHASES. 



A rcadian 
diversions. 



^'With 
fipe and 
fute.'' 



(See In- 
dex.) 



H. C. Bun- 
uer. 



shortcomings, not the least of which in some of them 
is that even perfection which is in itself a fault ; but 
a general advance is just as evident in their poetry 
as in the prose fiction for which they now are held in 
honor throughout the English-speaking worldc 

A phase of our verse, illustrating its present station, 
reflects the new London vogue, and has been men- 
tioned in comparison with Dr. Holmes's lighter vein. 
I refer to the plenitude of metrical trifles, society- 
verse, belles choses in the French forms that are so 
taking. Various new-comers make their entrance ac- 
cordingly ; scarcely one but turns you off his rondeau 
or ballade, and very cleverly withal. Blithe measures 
written gracefully, like those of Sherman, Minturn 
Peck, etc., are more agreeable than the prentice-work 
of sentimentalists. A sprightly Mercutio is better 
company than your juvenile Harold or Werter. They 
serve very well, moreover, for the travesties and " sat- 
ire harming not " of the boulevard press. Our young 
collegians, of whom Loring, who died in his adven- 
turous youth, was the precursor, are apt at such 
devices. It is curious to receive rhymes of the same 
kind from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Cambridge, 
England. Mr. Scollard's are just as well turned as 
Mr. Ropes's, and are not without signs of good omen. 
The line of advance has been exemplified by a poet 
who began in this way, the author of Airs from Ar- 
cady. Bunner's verse, whether of the gayer kind, or 
rising to the merit of his more ideal lyrics and son- 
nets, is a hopeful inscription at the parting of the 
ways. It already commends itself to those who look 
for feeling under grace, and shows that he now can 
make his standing with the muse depend upon the 
constancy of his devotion. 

Before discussing further the latest tendencies, let 



THE SOUTH. 



449 



The Soutlu 



US see what is doing in those precincts to which we 
naturally turn for literature of a specific flavor. The 
Soutii, once so ambitious, has been very barren of 
poetry during the last thirty years, either mindful of 
Foe's conviction that there was no equal chance for 
her native writers, or feeling that they were too remote 
from the world to keep up with its progressive changes. 
I think that standard literature, including poetry, is 
read with more interest in the South than here, and 
oratory there is still more than a tradition. But the 
South has been unfortunate in the loss of promising 
writers. One such was Timrod, whose handiwork was 



skilful and often imaginative and strong. Timrod's 
" Cotton Boll " was a forerunner of the method of a 
still finer poet than he, whose career was equally pa- 
thetic. The name of Sidney Lanier brings him clearly 
to recollection — as I saw him more than once in the 
study of our lamented Deukalion; the host so buoyant 
and sympathetic ; the Southerner nervous and eager, 
with dark hair and silken beard, features delicately 
moulded, pallid complexion, hands of the slender, 
white, artistic type. The final collection of his writ- 
ings, with an adequate and feeling memoir by Dr. 
Ward, confirms me in an already expressed belief that 
Lanier's difficulties were explained by the very traits 
which made his genius unique. His musical faculty 
was compulsive ; it inclined him to override Lessing's 
law of the distinctions of art, and to essay in language 
feats that only the gamut can render possible. For 
all this, one now sees clearly that he was a poet, and 
bent upon no middle flight. He magnified his office, 
and took a prophetic view of its restored supremacy. 
The juvenile pieces here first brought together, al- 
though his biographer apologizes for them, have little 
in common with ordinary verse of the time. " Nir- 
29 



Henry 

Timrod: 

1829-67. 



Sid}tey 
Laiiier : 
1842-S1. 



His col- 
lected 
''PoefHS,'* 
1884. 



Lessing's 
"■ Laoc 



Lanier'' s 
early and 
sponta- 
jieous veiiu 



450 



SIDNEY LANTER. 



His 

maturer 
work ." its 
tJieory. 



Symphonic 
composi- 
tions. 



Their 
merit and 
their 
/ailing. 



vana," "Resurrection," and the sougs for "The 
Jacquerie," are such as herald a new voice ; and later 
efforts of the kind also show his gift unadulterated by 
meditations on rhythmical structure. Among these are 
the " Song of the Chattahoochee," almost as haunting 
as " Ulalume," "The Revenge of Hamish," — than 
which there are few stronger ballads, — " The Mocking 
Bird," "Tampa Robins," "The Stirrup-Cup," "The 
Bee," and "The Ship of Earth." But turn to the 
productions which he deemed far more significant, in 
view of their composition upon a new and symphonic 
method. In time he doubtless might have wrought 
out something to which these would seem but pre- 
liminary experiments. The Centennial cantata was 
written to be sung, and when rendered accordingly 
no longer appeared grotesque. We may surmise that 
the adaptation not of melody alone, but also of har- 
mony and counterpoint, to the uses of the poet, was 
Lanier's ultimate design. Nor is it safe to gainsay 
the belief that he would have accomplished this more 
nearly, but for his early death and the hindrances of 
sickness and embarrassment that long preceded it. 
Compositions suggestive and reverberant as " Sun- 
rise " and "The Marshes of Glynn" go far toward 
vindicating his method. Yet even in these there is a 
surplusage, and an occasional failure to make not 
only outlines but impressions decidedly clear. "The 
Symphony," " Corn," and other over-praised ventures 
on the same plan, seem to me nebulous, and often 
mere recitative. The danger of too curious specula- 
tion is suggested by the strained effect of several 
ambitious failures, contrasted with the beauty of his 
unstudied work. An old foe, didacticism, creeps in 
by stealth when work upon a theoretical system is 
attempted. Let critics deduce what laws they mayj 



PROMISE OF Z^//^ SOUTH AXD WEST. 



451 



it is not for the poet deliberately to set about illus- 
trating- them. The fornuihis devised by Poe and others 
often are found to suit, designedly or not, their inven- 
tor's personal capabilities. Lanier's movement to en- 
large the scope of verse was directly in the line of 
his own endowment; he has left hints for successors 
who may avoid his chief mistake — that of wandering 
along in improvisation like some facile, dreamy master 
of the key-board. That remarkable piece of analysis, 
The Science of English Verse, serves little purpose ex- 
cept, like Coleridge's metaphysics, to give us further 
respect for its author's intellectual powers. 

Hayne's vitality, courage, and native lyrical impulse 
have kept him in voice, and his people regard him 
with a tenderness which, if a commensurate largesse 
were added, should make him feel less solitary among 
his pines. Various Southern poets, — Cooke, Randall, 
Burns Wilson of Kentucky, Boner, and others, open 
vistas of the life and spirit of their region. Town- 
send's ballads, in their sturdy, careless way, speak for 
the poetic side of a peculiarly American writer, true 
to memories of a boyhood on the " Eastern Shore." 
His tales, and the strongly dramatic fiction of Cable, 
Miss Murfree, Page, Johnston, etc., more clearly be- 
token the revived imagination of a glowing clime. 
The great heart of the generous and lonely South, too 
long restrained, — of the South once so prodigal of 
romance, eloquence, gallant aspiration, — once more 
has found expression. It enables us to know it, hav- 
ing begun at last to comprehend its true self. 

That the public is always on the alert for what is 
both good and novel was illustrated by Bret Harte's 
leap into favor with his portraitures of a new and 
scenic world. His prose idyls of the camp and coast, 
even more than his ballads, were the vouchers of a 



''The 
Science of 
E^iglish 
Verse,'''' 
1S80. 

Pajtl 
Hamilton 
Hayiie : 
1831- 



jf nines 
Ryder 
Randall I 
1839- 

George 
Alfred 
Town- 
send : 



Promise of 
the South. 



TJu Pa- 
cific Slope. 

Fraft-cis 
Bret 
Harte •' 
1837- 



452 



HARTE. — MILLER. 



Cincinna- 
ius Hiner 
{yoagum) 
Miller : 



Charles 
Warren 
Stoddard : 
1840- 

Charles 
Henry 
Phelps : 
1853- 



poet ; familiar as the verse at once became, it is far 
less creative than the stories. The serious portion of 
it, excepting a few dialect pieces, — " Jim," " In the 
Tunnel," etc., — is much like the verse of Longfellow, 
Whittier, and Taylor ; the humorous poems, though 
never wanting in some touch of nature, are apt to be 
what we do not recognize as American. But of either 
class it may be said that it is, like the rhyming of his 
master, Thackeray, the overflow of a rare genius, 
whose work must be counted among the treasures of 
the language. Mr. Harte may be termed the founder, 
and thus far has been the most brilliant exemplar, of 
our transcontinental school. Joaquin Miller is, first 
of all, a poet, if one may judge from the relative 
merits of his verse and prose, — the latter of which 
does not show his spirit and invention at their best. 
The Songs of the Sierras, as a first book, was no 
ordinary production. Its metrical romances, notwith- 
standing obvious crudities and affectations, gave a 
pleasurable thrill to the reader. Here was something 
like the Byronic imagination, set aglow by the free- 
dom and splendor of the Western ranges, or by turns 
creating with at least a sensuous vraisemblance an ideal 
of the tropics which so many Northern minstrels have 
dreamed of and sung. Miller still has years before 
him, and often lyrics from his pen suggest that, if he 
would add a reasonable modicum of purpose to his 
sense of the beautiful, the world would profit by the 
result. Among other poets of the Pacific Slope, War- 
ren Stoddard and Phelps seem more indifferent to 
local flavor, and refine their work in the usual manner 
of the Eastern school. 

Surveying the broad central region of tilth and 
traffic between the Mississippi River and the Appa- 
lachian Range, — the most fertile land on earth, and 



PI A TT. — HA Y. 



453 



tenanted by a people whose average culture exceeds 
that of any race numerically equal, — we find it sensi- 
tive to music and art, but not yet fruitful of that 
poesy which, as Sidney declared, alone can outvie 
nature, and " make the too-much-loved earth more 
lovely." The Ohio valley lost two poets, — one in 
battle, the other after he had lived to write our most 
effective ballad of the war, — Lytle and Forceythe 
^\'illson, each of whom had unquestionable lyrical 
talent. John Piatt, the laureate of prairie and home- 
stead life, has won a just reputation for his reflective 
and idyllic verse. He has a Wordsworthian sympathy 
with nature, and knowledge of its forms, and a sincere 
purpose. He transmits with much simplicity the air 
and bloom of the prairie, the fire-light in the settler's 
home, and the human endeavor of the great inland 
States he knows so well. Will Carleton struck a nat- 
ural vein by instinct, in his farm-ballads, and has been 
rewarded for the tenacity with which he has pursued 
it. Others, like Venable and Harney, find their way 
to the households of a rural constituency ; they have 
the merit of presenting that to which they are wonted 
— they know whereof they affirm. 

John Hay, whose writings are at once fine and 
strong, has been so engrossed by a rare experience 
of " cities, . . . councils, governments," as scarcely to 
have done full justice to his sterling gifts. With his 
taste, mental vigor, and mastery of style, he may well 
be taken to task for neglecting a faculty exception- 
ally his own. The uncompromising dialect-pieces, 
which made a hit as easily as they were thrown off, 
are the mere excess of his pathos and humor. Such 
poetry as the blank-verse impromptu on Liberty shows 
the. higher worth of a man who should rise above 
indifference, and the hindrance of his mood, and in 



The 
Ifiland 

Siates. 



Lytle and 
Willson. 
{See 
Index. ) 



John 
James 

Piatt : 
1835- 



WilliaTn 
Carlet07t ' 
1845- 

Williatn 
Henry 
Vetiable : 
1836- 

WilliaTft 
Wallace 
Harjiey : 
183X- 

John 
Hay: 



454 



ID YLS. — DRAMA S. — TRANS LA TIONS. 



^^Scholar 
Gypsies.'^'' 



Denton 
yacques 
Snider : 



William 

Leighton: 

1833- 



William 
Young : 
1847- 

Receni 
transla- 
tors. 



Seep. 55. 



ySee 

Index.) 



these spiritless times take up the lyre again, nor fit 
fully touch the strings. 

In places remote from the literary market, we often 
discover signs of hopeful energy. The best models 
are read by isolated poets, whose seclusion the ca- 
pricious standards of the town oracles fail to influ- 
ence. Snider's Delphic Days., for example, a charm- 
ing idyl in the elegiac distich, was printed in St« 
Louis, through a singular coincidence, at the same 
date with Munby's " Dorothy " in England, — ■ the 
two being the only prolonged specimens of this meas- 
ure, if I mistake not, which our language affords. 
Agamem?ton^s Daughter, by the same hand, is another 
contrast to the bounds of every-day song. Leigh- 
ton's legendary dramas. The Sons of Godwin and At 
the Court of King Edwin, are creditable to our liter- 
ature. Their romantic themes, by inheritance and 
the liberties of art, plainly are within the usufruct of 
an American poet. A drama of like cast, and suc- 
cessfully adapted to the stage, is Pe?idragon, the work 
of an Illinoisian, William Young. 

The department of translation, which (as well as 
that of devotional verse) has been noted in a former 
chapter, is at present somewhat neglected, though 
there are minor contributions by Lea, F. Peterson, 
Mrs. Conant, and others. Perhaps the most suggestive 
of the late efforts in this field are Miss Preston's 
charming translations from the Provengal and her 
version of the Georgics. Rowland's ^neid is rude 
and elegant by turns, but of interest to those who 
believe with me that the English accentuate hexam- 
eter is on the whole our best instrument for literal 
and lineal rendering of the classical measure. The 
translation of Virgil's complete works, by Wilstach, 
is more elaborate. It is written in flexible blank* 



DIALECT VERSE, ETC. 



455 



\^erse, and garnished with copious notes and a review 
of former English versions. This student, who does 
not hick temerity, is transkiting " Tlie Divine Comedy," 
upon a metrical system hitherto unessayed. 

Few dialects of our tongue, except those of Scot- 
land, Lancashire, and Dorset, have been more clev- 
erly handled for metrical effect than those peculiar 
to the United States. The Atlantic varieties have 
been used to good purpose, as we have seen, from 
the time of Fessenden's " Country Lovers " to that 
wherein are recorded the exploits of Hans Breit- 
mann. Harte's and Hay's successes in a correspond- 
ing line increased the popular regard for their bet- 
ter work. Riley's Hoosier lyrics often are more terse 
and pointed than the numerous ballads of Carleton. 
Some of the most attractive and piquant of Ameri- 
can folk-songs are in the dialect of our African 
population. North and South. Stephen Foster, the 
pioneer of " minstrel " song-writers, whose touching or 
humorous ditties were wedded to genuine melody, de- 
serves remembrance. A group, with the author of 
"Uncle Remus" included, has diligently cultivated 
the art of writing plantation -verse. Mrs. Preston, 
Sidney and Clifford Lanier, the late Mrs. McDow- 
ell and Irwin Russell, Miss McLean, Macon, and 
many others, have contributed to this quaint anthol- 
ogy, which — at its extremes of humor, as in 
" Reb'rend Quacko Strong," or of melody and devo- 
tional pathos, as in " De Sheepfol' " — certainly is 
an original outgrowth of the cisatlantic muse. 



in. 

Such is a fairly representative list of those to rhe/o 
whom our recent poetry owes its being. A protest i^""''*"* 



Dialect- 
verse. 



See p. 59, 
and cp. 
''Victo- 
rian 
Poets " ; 
pp. 278, 
279. 



yatnes 
Whitcoinb 
Riley : 
1854- 

See p>. 49. 

Plan- 
tatio7i 
lyrics. 



Joel 

Cha7idler 
Harris .' 
184S- 



Trwin 
R lis sell: 

'853-79- 

{A nd see 
Index. ) 



456 



IMPRESSIONS LEFT BY THIS SURVEY. 



represen- 
tative list. 



Cp. " Vic- 
torian 
Poets " .• 
tP- 290, 
291. 



Traits, as 
coTnpared 
with those 
of the gen- 
eral choir 
abroad. 



Question 
as to the 
relative 
i^nportance 
of our lat- 
ter-day 
song. 



against so free a range of selection may be entered 
by some, who fail to consider that for each name 
here found a score of others could be cited. Doubt- 
less many of the latter have equal claims to notice, 
this summary having been made with no design of 
completeness, but as a sufficient basis for remarks 
on the weakness, quite as much as on the strength, 
of our present movement, and on the chances of the 
near future. 

At the outset it can be honestly asserted, in be- 
half of the writers named, that as a whole they do 
not show less favorably than the corresponding mod- 
ern choir of Great Britain. It would be difficult to 
assort them in groups such as we have observed 
abroad; apart from local differences of style they 
bear an almost monotonous relationship to one an- 
other. This common likeness, however, is an illusive 
something which renders their productions American. 
If their verse presents few absolutely novel types, it 
is more charged with national sentiment than that of 
the late English poets. It pays little regard to 
pseudo- classicism, middle -age restorations, and to 
themes borrowed from other lands and languages. 
It is sincere and impulsive, and has a New World 
mode of looking at things and considering them. 
Finally, the w^ork of the most expert among these 
writers, both sexes included, is often as interesting 
for technical merit as that of their distant compeers, 
although it ^ay be that we have fewer in number 
who reach a faultless standard. 

Granting or claiming thus much, a reviewer must 
put the question directly to his conscience - — How 
does the most of this recent verse impress you ? 
Upon the foregoing summary, what can one honestly 
declare of its force and significance ? Its achieve- 



AN INTERREGNUM. 



457 



ments have been noted ; the side on which it is triv- 
ial or deficient must be as plainly shown, lest the 
narrator be forced hereafter to regret that he with- 
held his convictions. Nor is it easy to gloss over 
the dynamic insufficiency of our present metrical lit- 
erature. The belief scarcely can be resisted "that 
there is, if not a decadence, at least a poetic inter- 
regnum, as compared with the past and measuring 
our advance in sundry fields of activity. As I have 
said, the first influence is ended ; there is a pause 
before the start and triumph of another. This may 
be frankly acknowledged ; in fact, the situation is 
merely correlative with that observed, ten years ago, 
in our look across the sea. It is none the less one 
on which neither our poets nor their countrymen 
have much reason to plume themselves. If our poe- 
try, since the time of Longfellow, has not kept pace 
with our general movement, this of itself implies an 
interregnum. I suspect that it is of less relative im- 
portance than if it had held the point already gained. 
Its new leaders, at all events, are not invested with 
the authority of those to whom these essays chiefly 
have been devoted. Their volumes scarcely receive 
the welcome — nor have they the bearing: and import \ . , 

-' o i , IV kick we 

as an indispensable part of literature — that apper- have been 
tained to the poems of "The Seaside and the Fire- 
side," " Evangeline," the " Voices of Freedom," 
"Snow-Bound," "The Biglow Papers," "Under the 
Willows," "Poems of the Orient," and the "Poems" 
of the Concord sage. To the careful eye they seem 
less suggestive of changes and results than were 
" The Raven and other Poems," " Songs of Sum- 
mer," and "Leaves of Grass." They do not, like 
some of the books here named, supply either lay or 
professional classes with the most essential portion 



Measured 
by tkat 



cofisider- 
ing. 



458 



DEFICIENT PURPOSE AND IDEALITY. 



Our tnod- 
trn poets. 



One feat- 
ure. 



Spirit of 
the nt^iv 
school. 



of their reading. We see that this is partly due to 
conditions which it is just as well should obtain for 
a season, and which the poets are not able to avert. 
Before recurring to this difficulty, let us see how far 
they are their own bafflers and justly to be held re- 
sponsible. 

Some of them have given such evidence of the 
faculty divine as to be sure of enrolment in the Par- 
nassian registry. Others have composed charming 
bits of verse, — pledges, as yet unfulfilled, of some- 
thing larger and more creative. We do not ask for 
masterpieces, but how few the recent poems which 
approach in breadth and interest those of the vet- 
eran school ! Do our poets really trust their call- 
ing, in defiance of temporal conditions, however dis- 
couraging ? Do they not share in a measure the 
sentiment which regards ideality as an amiable weak- 
ness, the relic of a Quixotic period, and thus feel 
half-ashamed of their birthright ? Few of them, at 
the best, cultivate the latter seriously, as their avowed 
means of expression ; and of these few the majority 
perhaps are women. There are some who will be 
ungracious enough to say that a time when religion 
and poesy are sustained by the graceful, devoted, 
but distinctly minor services of women, is not one 
of supremacy for either the pulpit or the lyre. Those 
who demur to this, and who refer to the authors of 
the " Sonnets from the Portuguese " and " Romola," 
will be told that Mrs. Browning and George Eliot 
were forerunners, not exemplars, of a golden era 
when it shall be no longer true. 

Even if our poets are doing the best within their 

power, their misconception of relative values is much 

the same as that recently noted of the minor English 

I school. To our predecessors the spirit of a work was 



O VER-REFINEMENT. 



459 



all in all ; the form was often marred by careless exe- 
cution. It took years of Keats, Tennyson, and the 
study of their masters, to rectify this, and then the 
drift set quite too far in an opposite direction ; until 
at last a Neo-Romantic group wreaked its thoughts 
upon details of sound and color, placed decoration 
above construction, the form of verse above its motive, 
• — thus missing the impulsive cadence, the more ethe- 
real structure, to which the evasive spirit of poetry 
mysteriously inclines. Heine's assertion, that a poet 
must have natural tones in his lyrics and characters 
in his narrative or dramatic efforts, was sustained by 
the impotency of our own verse-makers before the 
time of Whittier and Longfellow. With them and 
their comrades American poetry took on at least the 
merit of being natural, and gained a foothold ; but 
this merit is less apparent in our later verse, whose 
forms, though neatly mastered, breed a temper as ar- 
tificial as their own. In brief, our lyrics of the past 
had the virtue of simplicity, but were less noteworthy 
for imagination ; those which have succeeded them 
fail equally in poetry's highest attribute, and their 
interest is due less to simplicity than to art — the art 
which, being a substitute for imaginative vitality, runs 
into artifices and mere technique. Over-refinement, 
through a strict interpretation of that excellent canon, 
" Art for Art's sake," is a vice of the period. Art is a 
language, and a seemingly careless workman may be 
a truer artist than his painstaking fellow. When one 
has little to say, his technics are a kind of pedantry, 
while a faulty poem or picture may be great because a 
great thought or character is in it. The best workman 
is he who adapts means to the noblest end, and we 
tire of those who, with no message to deliver, elaborate 
their style. The olSest races have discovered that no 



Cp. ''Vic- 
iorian 
Poets " .• 
/>/>. 284-6, 



Shnplicity 
and arti- 
fice. 



A rt wins 

by expres- 
sion. Cp, 
" yicto- 
rian 
Poets " .- 
p. 288. 



460 



ABUNDANT MINOR VERSE, 



Passing 
vozues. 



^^The ac- 
complish- 
r/ieni of 
verse, ''^ 



Half- 
efforts, 



labor is artistic, unless strictly to the purpose ; a few 
sure lines, and the result may be attained. We see, 
however, that technical experts, though devoid of 
imagination, often have a sudden following among 
new men. This is because their skill is addressed to 
the profession rather than to the public, and also 
because the young recognize the dexterity which they 
must acquire, while the creative genius of true masters 
as yet escapes them. Hence the instant vogue of 
novel forms, requiring adroitness for their perfection, 
and so elegant as to conciliate even those they do 
not capture. When real additions to our English 
method, they will bear use and reproduction. But, 
after a few men of exquisite talents have employed 
them to advantage, the public grows weary of modes 
so peculiar that we are compelled to dwell upon the 
form and not the thought. 

Thus we have in view, if not precisely a mob of 
gentlemen who write with ease, an increased number 
of those writing with the profusion of ease and the 
pain of curious labor, and often at a loss of individual 
.distinction. Lyrics, sonnets, canzonets, are produced 
on every hand. The average is so good that, despite 
the beauty of an occasional piece, few can be said to 
stand out boldly from the rest. Considering the ac- 
cumulated wealth of English poetry, it is questionable 
whether more sonnets, etc., are a real addition to it, 
and if a place worth having can be earned by polish- 
ing the countless facets of gems dependent on the 
fanciful analysis of love and other emotions. Again, 
some of our poets, like certain painters, avoid con- 
tinued effort, and satisfy themselves with sketch-work 
— a facile way of keeping up expectation. Having 
mastered one's vocation, w^hy not practice it with a 
determined hand t Too much assurance was the fault 



DIVISION OF EFFORT. 



401 



"■If thy 
heart fall 
thee, cli})ib 
not at all.'''' 



of our earlier period, but the ambition that went with 
it stimulated a few to real achie\ements. It is hard 
to account for our easy modern contentment. In older i 
countries the mines have been so well worked that 
there is an excuse for resorting to the " tailings," but 
here there should be the broadest encouragement for 
prospectors. No doubt our reaction from the old- 
fashioned conceit has its effect on able men, and 
makes them cleave to ground of which they have no 
fear. Too much credit is awarded now to the knowl- 
edge of one's limitations. A poet, most of all, should 
not believe in limitations ; by ignoring them, a few 
will reach the heights. But our aspirants seem to 
feel that nothing better can be done than to amuse 
readers who consider poetry a diversion, and they 
either fear to put their fate to the touch " to gain or 
lose it all," or utterly fail to realize the chance at 
this moment existing. And so, if poetry has lost its 
hold, it is in some degree because no brilliant leader 
compels attention to it, devoting himself to the hazard 
of arduous and bravely ventured song. 

The time, then, is not one of transition, save in the 
sense that all periods are transitional. It is inter- 
calary, 3'et as well defined as the middle ring of Sat- 
urn, gaining its light and substance from a multitude 
of little quantities, — notable, in fact, for the profusion 
and excellence of its minor verse. And here it must 
be borne in mind that not a few of our idealists are 
directing their main efforts to prose composition. For 
example, one of the finest elegiac poems of recent 
years, The North Shore Watch, is privately printed by 
Mr. Woodberry, who thus far has permitted the ordi- ! 
nary reader to know him only as a biographer and 
critical essayist. Among the chief Victorian writers. 



we found but two or three that miirht be classified as 



Profusion 
of mi 71 or 
verse. 



Ideality 
diverted 
to prose 
coinposi- 
tlon. 

North 
Shore 
Watch:' 

George 
Edvoard 

U'ood- 
berry : 
1855- 



462 



POET-NO VELISTS. 



Novelist- 
poeis, etc. 
See p. 75, 
and cp. 
" Victo- 
rian 
Poets''': 
fp. 8i) 82) 
251-3. 



U^illiatn 

Pean 
Howells '. 



novelist-poets. Hood was almost the only journalist- 
poet of note, a true vocalist, jaded by hackwork. 
Nowadays, the conditions are reversed ; the rhythmic 
art is more frequently an avocation. Among our nov- 
elists, however, Aldrich always seems the poet, — an 
author with whom song has the precedence. His 
tales are the prose of a poetic artist, and owe to this 
fact their airy charm. Howells furnishes an instance 
of the apt recognition of existing tendencies. The 
wisdom he has displayed " in his generation " goes 
far to justify the diversion we are observing. His 
early verse, issued conjointly with that of his friend 
Piatt, bore unusual marks of promise, nor has he 
quite broken with the muse or ceased to hold her 
image in his heart. Otherwise his bent, like Mr. 
James's, was that of a critic, scholar, analyst ; and the 
determined evolution of a masterly novel-writer, from 
a youth of the qualifications involved, might serve as 
a text for homilies on the power of the human will. 
His pen being his fortune, his chosen profession that 
of a man of letters, he manfully trained himself to 
the production of literature that he foresaw would be 
welcome and remunerative ; this, in a series of works, 
— ■ at first descriptive, then inventive, — constantly ad- 
vancing in perception, in management of incident and 
character, until he now stands where we find him, in 
the front rank of those who impress observers with a 
sense of our literary progress. His poetic gift serves 
him well in translation, in dramatic adaptation, and 
with respect to the feeling and artistic effect of his 
tenderest episodes. Waiving discussion of Mr. How- 
ells's method as a novelist, who can question that 
he has judged wisely, and has done far better for the 
public than if he had pursued the art that was his 
early choice? 



ADl'AXCE I\ J' ROSE FICTION. 



463 



By such examples more light is cast upon the re- 
duced importance of our song- makers, and ground 
discovered for a belief that this is transitory and that 
a fresh departure will anon be made. Fancy and im- 
agination are still rife, but their energy finds vent in 
new directions. Accomplished craftsmen, some of 
whom thirty years ago might have been numbered 
among the poets, now supply the public with its im- 
aginative rations in the guise of prose fiction and ro- 
mance. Through instinct or judgment, they have 
occupied the gap in our literature. The time has 
been opportune ; famous innings were made by the 
elder minstrels ; our school of fiction had been repre- 
sented only by a few rare and exceptional names. 
So keen has been the new impulse, that the young 
neophyte of to-day, instead of shaping his vague con- 
ceptions into rhythm and imitating the poets within 
his knowledge, longs to emulate the foremost novel- 
ists. In the flush of our latest conquest, the rank 
and file naturally overrate the relative worth of prose 
fiction, which, at its best, — as will appear on a brief 
consideration of the world's literary masterpieces, — 
is not a more vital and enduring creation than the 
poet's song. Yet the movement has resulted in a de- 
cided gain to the prestige of our national authorship. 
With a staff of novelists and romancers well equipped 
in both invention and style, — Howells, Aldrich, Jul- 
ian Hawthorne, Eggleston, Cable, James, Harte, Craw- 
ford, Bishop, Stockton, Lathrop, Kip, Mrs. Stoddard, 
Miss Jewett, Miss Woolson, Miss Murfree, Miss 
Howard, Mrs. Foote, and others who also are ade- 
quate to cope with the transatlantic experts, — in 
view of the results already obtained from the field in 
which these popular authors are so active, none can 
assume that the diversion of creative energy thus ex- 



New out- 
lets of 
imagina- 
tive ener- 
gy- 



The pre- 

vailing^ 

impulse. 



Cofnper*' 
sation. 



{See 
Index.) 



464 



A LIFE-SCHOOL BETOKENED. 



What 

iheer ? 



A lesson 
from the 
novelists. 



Need of a 
Life- 
school. 



A n oppor- 
tune titne. 



emplified has not brought with it a measurable com- 
pensation. 

IV. 

Both exterior and subjective conditions having thus 
determined the present office of the imagination, the 
breathing-spell of poetry is not without promise of a 
stronger utterance than ever when its voice shall be 
renewed. We shall have more poets yet, and some 
of those who have been named will contribute, I 
doubt not, to the hastening of that renewal. They 
can derive from our fiction itself a shrewd lesson for 
their guidance. Their predecessors fully met the need 
for idyllic verse, relating to home, patriotism, religion, 
and the workaday life of an orderly people. They 
did not scrutinize, and vividly present, the coils of in- 
dividual being. Our people have outgrown their ju- 
venescence, tested their manhood, and now demand a 
lustier regimen. They crave the sensations of mature 
and cosmopolitan experience, and are bent upon what 
we are told is the proper study of mankind. The 
rise of our novelists was the answer to this craving; 
they depict Life as it is, though rarely as yet in its 
intenser phases. Those who, besides meeting Mr. 
James's requirement that " the mind of the producer 
shall be displayed," do reflect life in something more 
than a commonplace aspect are the chroniclers, chiefly, 
of provincial episodes, confined to sections so narrow 
that it is scarcely needful to linger in them through- 
out the narrative of a sustained work. Their welcome 
is partly due to the fact that their studies are bolder 
and more dramatic than those of the restrained East- 
ern school. The muster-roll of the latter has in- 
creased somewhat more rapidly than its market. We 
have seen poetry out of demand; the same thing be^ 



POETS AXn THE PUBLIC. 



465 



gins to be observed of prose fiction. Renewed atten- 
tion is given to history, memoirs, travels ; but many 
signs declare that there never was a time when a live 
and glowing poel would ha\e a better chance than 
now. In the multitude 'of ambitious novelists, distinc- 
tion is less easily gained. Only the poet can excite 
the subtlest thrills, the most abiding sensations. The 
promise of his return lies in the truth that our spirit- 
ual nature does abhor a vacuum, — the need insures 
the supply. Though our public has resorted to prose 
literature for its wants, it now and then still reads a 
poem with avidity. The sudden popularity of Ar- 
nold's "Light of Asia" — the work of a scholar and 
enthusiast rather than of a strongly original hand — 
was of real significance. That production gave a 
sensuous and legendary idealization of the religious 
feeling of an impressible body of readers; it appealed 
to an existing sentiment ; it focalized the rays in 
which the faiths of the East and the West are blend- 
ing throughout the modern world. In short, it was 
most timely, and it wms both attractive and dimen- 
sional. If, then, the people care little for current 
poetry, is it not because that poetry cares little for 
the people and fails to assume its vantage-ground t 
Busying itself with intricacies of form and sound and 
imagery, it scarcely deigns to reach the general heart. 
Your skill is admirable, say the people, and of inter- 
est to your own guild, but we ask that it shall be 
used to some purpose. Convey to us the intellect 
and passion wherewith poets are thought to be en- 
dowed, the gloom and glory of human life, the na- 
tional aspiration, the pride of the past and vision of 
the future. 

Rh3'thmical productions will be acceptable that com- 
pare with those of the past, as vigorous figure-paint- 
30 



The poets 
at id tfie 
pjiblic. 



The for- 
mer tnitst 
respond to 



466 



GROWING DRAMATIC SPIRIT. 



the ttew 

dramatic 

instinct. 



Cp. "-Vic- 
torian 
Poets " .- 
f. 344- 



Promise of 
a dramatic 
inovement- 



ings with the canvases of our elder artists. Even in 
landscape we have reached the stage where human 
feeling, and that American, pervades the most favored 
work. Nor will it be enough to depict life in aggre- 
gated and general types. Whitman has achieved this, 
conveying a national spirit in his symphonic echoes 
of the murmuring towns and forests and ocean-waves. 
He gives us life and movement, but the specific char- 
acter, the personal movement, seldom animate his 
pages. Individuals, men and women, various and 
real, must be set before us in being and action, ■ — ■ 
above all, in that mutual play upon one another's 
destinies which results from what we term the dra- 
matic purport of life. Thus rising above mere intro- 
spection and analysis, poetry must be not so much a 
criticism as the objective portrayal and illumination 
of life itself — and that not only along the unevent- 
ful, quiescent flow of rural existence, but upon the 
tides of circumstance where men are striving for in- 
tense sensations and continuous development. 

In other words, the time has come for poetry, in 
any form, that shall be essentially dramatic. This 
kind has rounded each recurring cycle in other liter- 
atures than our own. It is a symptom of maturity, 
and we, in our turn, approach the age when life at- 
tains fire and color and is full of experiences that 
give tone to art. I think that our future efforts will 
result in dramatic verse, and even in actual dramas 
for both the closet and the stage. I am aware that 
this belief has been entertained before, and prema- 
turely; it was as strong in the time of Tyler and 
Dunlap and Payne, nor would our own experiments 
be much more significant than theirs, were it not for 
the recent and encouraging efforts of our younger 
authors, several of whom are among the poets already 



THE STAGE. 



467 



named. Playwrights still feel compelled to offer ru- 
dimentary work to their audiences. The primary and 
denominative element of the actor's art, that of ac- 
tion, with every aid of scenic effect, just now is all 
in all. The text is but an adjunct to the pantomime. 
Realism, also, is as conspicuous in our theatres as in 
the latest French and English novels. It was desir- 
able to get beyond stale and absurd conventionality, 
yet certain conventions are indispensable to art; there 
is nothing ideal in a slavish, mechanical reproduction 
of speech and manners. Unduly favored as the text 
once may have been, we now err as plainly in the 
opposite way. A poet turns playwright, and there 
besrins the inevitable conflict with the stage itself. 
He yields to the conviction of actor and manager 
that the text will never regain the critical interest of 
audiences. I make bold to think otherwise ; to hold 
that belief is to overlook the recorded equipoise of 
text and action at every epoch when the theatre has 
been preeminent. The sentiment of the hour may be 
against the production of what are termed literary 
plays ; yet nothing, after all, is surer to draw than 
some familiar tragedy or comedy of the great dra- 
matic poets. In Italy, France, Germany, it is the 
same. The people want amusement, and in all times 
they prefer the best offered ; when there were none 
but poetic dramas, they sustained them, and intelli- 
gently traversed the rendering of dialogue and phrase. 
On the other hand, wretched mounting and acting 
w'ill make the finest text wearisome. The w^hole dis- 
pute turns largely upon circumstance and fashion. 
Notwithstanding Tennyson's undramatic cast of gen- 
ius, he has succeeded — but only, as was predicted 
long ago, after successive trials and by a tour de force 
— in producing an excellent drama. " Becket," with 



Text atid 
action. 



Cp. ''Vic- 
torian 
Poets " ; 
/. 266. 



71ie Stage. 



Cp. " Vic- 
torian 
Poets " : 
f>p. igi, 
An- 
'■'■Becket.'^ 



468 



POET-PLA VWPIGHTS. 



''''Frances- 
ca da Ri- 



A 2idience 
and play- 
wrig-ht. 



Effects of 
ioiun-life. 



respect to action, plot, and language, is greatly supe- 
rior to many plays of the Knowles and Talfourd pe- 
riod, which still hold the stage ; and yet the public, 
and various theatrical critics, will have none of it. 
The time has been simply unpropitious. Boker's 
" Francesca da Rimini " waited twenty-five years for 
an actor and a manager fully to utilize its possibili- 
ties. 

We see that for the development of an ideal drama 
the public taste and sentiment must rise accordingly. 
The stage reflects these ; but it also can anticipate 
and help to form them, through works of genius which 
the people in the end will appreciate. The ambitious 
playwright, on his part, must realize that his faculty 
is the greater when adaptable and inventive. . Writer, 
actor, theatre and public, must unite to give effect to 
any drama. Brander Matthews says that " for a poetic 
play to have a success, it must be the work of one 
who is both poet and playwright ; who is, in fact, 
playwright first and poet after," — and cites the ex- 
amples of Moliere and Shakespeare and Hugo, and 
of lesser men. Playwrights not familiar with the 
stage from youth have succeeded only after failures. 
Our dramatists are likely to spring from those who, 
if not used to theatrical " business " and people, are 
thoroughly acquainted with town life. We know the 
retardant effect of society upon artists of exalted sen- 
sibility. Liszt's rival declares that social distractions 
have prevented the Abbe' from being a great composer ; 
that Bach's seclusion and Beethoven's deafness pro- 
tected them from outside voices and made them hear 
the voice of God within. Yet the dramatist, whose 
theme is human action, must have observed that ac- 
tion under the excitements and among the contrasted 
types of civic life. The increase of our cities itself 



THEME A\D ATMOSPHERE. 



469 



betokens a change from idNlIic to dramatic mctliods 
in literary art. 

But I have allowed my faith in the need of such 
a change to lead me into surmises concerning the rise 
of the stage-drama in America. The latter certainly 
would give a rapid impulse to the former. As it is, 
a young playwright like Carleton finds it prudent to 
adapt his labors to the immediate requirements of the 
stage, after testing his literary faculty by the composi- 
tion of a metrical drama, Me7?mo7i, a work indebted 
to Elizabethan models in its rhetoric and emblazonr}^, 
and not devoid of fine diction and poetic glow. 
Among the numerous plays offered to the managers, 
there probably are some of an elevated class that 
would be available under conditions which I think will 
not be long delayed. Meanwhile, under existing con- 
ditions, our few playwrights who combine tact with 
refinement, — and Bronson Howard should have the 
credit due to a pioneer who still works among the 
foremost, — probably have done the best that could 
be done, with a sense of what is now practicable, and 
a hopeful willingness to prepare the way for their 
successors, poetic or otherwise, in the early future. 
Time is all that is needed to give us the heroic tem- 
per and coadequate themes. Of the two, tradition 
is less essential to romance and the drama than a 
favoring atmosphere. The wreath must be held out 
by a public that delights in the Pythian games, and 
won by contestants worthy to receive it. 

V. 

There are questions that come home to one who 
would aid in speeding the return of " the Muse, dis- 



gusted at " the " age and chme." 



Can I, he asks, be 



Henry 
Guy 

Carleton : 
1855- 



"■Mein- 
non^'' 1884. 



Pioneer 
efforts. 



The poet's 
faculty 
coi)ipulsh<C 
and last- 



470 



THE POET'S CREDENTIALS. 



Vavoring 



reckoned with the promoters of her new reign ? Yes, 
it will be answered, if your effort is in earnest and if 
you are in truth a poet. To doubt of this is almost 
the doubt's own confirmation. That writer to whom 
rhythmic phrases come as the natural utterance of his 
extremest hope, regret, devotion, is a poet of some de- 
gree. At the rarest crises he finds that, without and 
even beyond his will, life and death and all things 
dear and sacred are made auxiliary to the compulsive 
purpose of his art ; just as in the passion for science, 
as if to verify the terrible irony of Balzac and Words- 
worth, the alchemist will analyze his wife's tears, the 
Linnaean will botanize even upon his mother's grave : — 

" Alas, and hast thou then so soon forgot 
The bond that with thy gift of song did go — 
Severe as fate, fixed and unchangeable ? 
Dost thou not know this is the poet's lot ! " 

If, when his brain is in working humor, its chambers 
filled with imaged pageantry, the same form of utter- 
ance becomes his ready servant, then he is a poet 
indeed. But if he has a dexterous metrical faculty, 
and hunts for theme and motive, — or if his verse 
does not say what otherwise cannot be said at all, — 
then he is a mere artisan in words, and less than 
those whose thought and feeling are too deep for 
speech. The true poet is haunted by his gift, even 
in hours of drudgery and enforced prosaic life« He 
cannot escape it. After spells of dejection and wea- 
riness, when it has seemed to leave for ever, it always, 
always, returns again — perishable only with himself. 
Again he will ask. What are my opportunities .? 
What is the final appraisement of the time and situa- 
tion ? We have noted those latter-day conditions that 
vex the poet's mind. Yet art is the precious outcome 
of all conditions ; there are none that may not be 



HIS OrrORTUXITY. 



471 



transmuted in its crucible. Science, wliose iconoclasm 
had to be considered, first of all, in our study of the 
Victorian period, has forced us to adjust ourselves to 
its dispensation. A scientific conliict with tradition 
always has been in progress, though never so deter- 
minedly as now. But the poet and artist keep pace 
with it, even forestall it, so that each new wonder 
leads to greater things, and the so-called doom of art 
is a victorious transition : — 



" If my l)ark sinks, 't is to another sea." 

As to material conditions, we find that the practical 
eagerness of the age, and of our own people before 
all, has so nearly satisfied its motive as to beget the 
intellectual and aesthetic needs to which beauty is the 
purveyor. As heretofore in Venice and other com- 
monwealths, first nationality, then riches, then the rise 
of poetry and the arts. — After materialism and the 
scientific stress, the demands of journalism have been 
the chief counter-sway to poetic activity. But our 
journals are now the adjuvants of imaginative effort 
in prose and verse ; the best of them are conducted 
by writers who have the literary spirit, and who make 
room for ideal literature, even if it does not swell 
their lists so rapidly as that of another kind. The 
poet can get a hearing ; our Chattertons need not 
star\'e in their garrets ; there never was a better mar- 
ket for the wares of Apollo, — their tuneful venders 
need not hope for wealth, but if one cannot make his 
genius something more than its own exceeding great 
reward, it is because he mistakes the period or scorns 
to address himself fitly to his readers. Finally, criti- 
cism is at once more catholic and more discriminating 
than of old. Can it make a poet, or teach him his 
mission ? Hardly ; but it can spur him to his best, 



hitellect- 
ual, 



Material, 
and 



Literary 



472 



SURSUM CORD A. 



ments. 



Poetry 
lot rnerely 
afi art, but 
an inspira- 
tion. 



R. S. 

Storrs : at 
Unio7i Col- 



and point out the heresies from which he must free 
himself or address the oracle in vain. 

Such being our opportunities, we have seen that 
the personal requirements are coequal, and their sum- 
ming-up may well be the conclusion of the whole 
matter. Warmth, action, genuine human interest, 
must vivify the minstrel's art ; the world will receive 
him if he in truth comes into his own. Taste and 
adroitness can no longer win by novelty. Natural 
emotion is the soul of poetry, as melody is of music ; 
the same faults are engendered by over-study of ei- 
ther art ; there is a lack of sincerity, of irresistible 
impulse, in both the poet and the composer. The 
decorative vogue has reached its lowest grade — that 
of assumption for burlesque and persiflage ; just as 
Pre-Raphaelitism, at first a reform in art, extended 
to poetry, to architecture, to wall-decoration, to stage- 
setting, finally to the dress of moonstruck blue-stock- 
ings and literary dandies. What has been gained in 
new design will survive. But henceforth the sense 
of beauty must have something " far more deeply in- 
terfused " : the ideal, which, though not made with 
hands of artificers, is eternal on the earth as in the 
heavens, because it is inherent in the soul. There is 
also one prerequisite, upon which stress was laid by 
Dr. Storrs in his application to modern art of 
Goethe's reservation as to the worth of certain engrav- 
ings : " Still, something is wanting in all these pic- 
tures — the Manly. . . . The pictures lack a certain 
urgent power," etc. Culture, I have said, will make 
a poet draw ahead of iiis unstudious fellows, but the 
resolve born of conviction is needed to sustain the 
advance. The lecturer rightly declared that only 
" courageous work will suit America, whose race is 
essentially courageous and stoical." Our key-note 



OUR NOVITIATE END ED. 



473 



assuredly should be that of freshness and joy ; the 
sadness of declining races, only, has the beauty of 
natural pathos. There is no cause for morbidly in- 
trospective verse — no need, 1 hope, foi* dilettante- 
ism — in this brave country of ours for centuries to 
come. 

I think, too, we may claim that there is no better 
ideal of manhood than the American ideal, derived 
from an aggregation of characteristic types. Our fu- 
ture verse should be more native than that of the 
past, in having a flavor more plainly distinct from 
the motherland. Not that our former contingent 
misrepresented the America of its time. Even Long- 
fellow's work, with so much of imported theme and 
treatment, conveyed a sentiment that came, say what 
we will, from no foreign source. The reason that a 
decidedly autochthonous kind was not then proffered, 
unless by Whitman, was that a distinction between 
the conditions of England and America was not more 
strongly established. Since the war our novitiate has 
ended. We welcome home-productions ; our servility 
to foreign judgment has lessened, and we apply with 
considerable self-poise our own standards of criti- 
cism to things abroad. We have outlived the greed 
of a childhood that depends on sustenance furnished 
by its elders, and are far indeed from the senile at- 
rophy which also must borrow to recruit its wasting 
powers. Our debt to acute foreign critics is none 
the less memorable. They, in truth, were the first to 
counsel us that we should lean upon ourselves ; to 
insist that we ought at least to escape Old World 
limitations, — the first to recognize so heartily any- 
thing purely American, even our sectional humor, as 
to bring about our discovery that it was not neces- 
sarily " a poor thing," although our " own." 



TJte 

A 7nerican 

ideal. 



474 



POINTS OF VANTAGE. 



A national 
type. See 
PP' 7-9> 96, 
97- 



Its promo- 
tion. 



The copy- 
right ques- 
tion. See 
pp. 23-25. 



A nurican 
taste. 



It is agreed that sectional types, which thus have 
lent their raciness to various productions, are subsid- 
iary to the formation of one that shall be national. 
A characte'r formed of mingling components must 
undergo the phases of defective hybridity ; our own 
is just beginning to assume a coherence that is the 
promise of a similar adjustment in art. As local 
types disappear there may be special losses, yet a 
general gain. The lifting of the Japanese embargo 
was harmful to the purity of the insular art, but 
added something to the arts of the world at large. 
Even now our English cousins, seeking for what they 
term Americanism in our literature, begin to find its 
flavor stealthily added to their own. 

Nothing will strengthen more rapidly the native 
bias of our literature than its increase of dramatic 
tone. Speech, action, and passion will be derived 
from life as here seen, from factors near at hand 
and stuff of which the writer himself is moulded. 
Our playwrights are now encouraged by a copyright 
royalty. All classes of literary workmen, however, 
still endure the disadvantage of a market drugged 
with stolen goods. Shameless as is our legal plun- 
dering of foreign authors, our blood is most stirred 
by the consequent injury to home literature, — by the 
wrongs, the poverty, the discouragement to which the 
foes of International Copyright subject our own writ- 
ers. The nerve and vitality of the latter can have 
no stronger demonstration than by the progress which 
they make while loaded with an almost insufferable 
burden. When this shall at last be lifted, their for- 
ward movement may answer to the most sanguine 
conjecture. Of two things they already are assured : 
First, the perception, the inborn taste, of their coun- 
trymen stands in need of less tutorage than that of 



THE NATIONAL INHERITANCE. 



475 



transatlantic Saxon races. Our people have blun- 
dered from isolation ; confront them with the models 
of older lands, and they quickly learn to choose the 
fit and beautiful, and the time is now reached when 
the finest models are widely attainable. Secondly, 
our inheritance is a language that is relatively the 
greatest treasure-house of the world's literature : at 
once the most laconic and the most copious of 
tongues, — the sturdiest in its foundations of emo- 
tion and utility, the most varied by appropriation of 
synonyms from all languages, new and old ; the 
youngest and most occidental of the great modes of 
speech, steadily diffusing itself about the globe, with 
no possible supplanter or successor except itself at 
further stages of maturity \ finally, elastic and copi- 
ous most of all in the land which adds to it new 
idioms, of cisatlantic growth, or assimilated from the 
dialects of many races that here contribute their dic- 
tion to its own. A language whose glory is that 
liven corruptions serve to speed its growth, and whose 
fine achievement long has been to make the neolo- 
gism, even the solecism, of one generation the clas- 
sicism of the next. This is the potent and sono- 
rous instrument which our poet has at his command, 
and the genius of his country, like Ariel, bids him 

" — take 
This slave of music, for my sake." 



Our 

English 

tongue. 



The twilight of the poets, succeeding to the past. 



brightness of their first diurnal course, is a favora- 
ble interval at which to review the careers of those 
whose work therewith is ended. Although at such a 
time public interest may set in other directions, I 



Present, 

and 

Future. 



476 



CONJECTURE OF THE DAWN. 



Art's 

changeless 

h-w. 



have adhered to a task so arduous, yet so fascinat- 
ing to the critical and poetic student. When the 
lustre of a still more auspicious day shall yield in 
its turn to the recurring dusk, a new chronicler will 
have the range of noble imaginations to consider, 
heightened in significance by comparison with the 
field of these prior excursions. But, if I have not 
wholly erred in respect to the lessons derivable from 
the past, he will not go far beyond them. The can- 
ons are not subject to change ; he, in turn, will de- 
duce the same elements appertaining to the chief of 
arts, and test his poets and their bequests by the 
same unswerving laws. And concerning the dawn 
which may soon break upon us unawares, as we 
make conjecture of the future of American song, it 
is difficult to keep the level of restraint • — to avoid 
" rising on the wings of prophecy." Who can doubt 
that it will correspond to the future of the land it- 
self, — of America now wholly free and interblend- 
ing, with not one but a score of civic capitals, each 
an emulative centre of taste and invention, a focus 
of energetic life, ceaseless in action, radiant with the 
glow of beauty and creative power. 



INDEX. 



INDEX. 



Abbey, Henry (1842- ), 443. 

Accent, 373 ; and quantity, 198. 

"Ad Vatem," 131. 

Addison, 286. 

Affaire CUmenceau, by Dumas, fils, 

36S. 
Aftectation, Poe's, 260 ; the bane of 

poetry, 312 ; Byron's, 312; types of, 

313 ; and see 3S8. 
Affluence, Lowell's, 'T^yj. 
Agamemnoti' s Daughter, Snider's, 454. 
Ages, The, Bryant's, 73. 
Airs from Arcady, Bunner's, 448. 
Akenside, 67. 
Albee, John, 443. 
Alcott, Amos Bronson, 52, 355. 
Alden, Henry Mills, on ^^'hitman 

3S1. 

Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 440 ; beauty 
of his verse and prose, ib. ; artistic 
restraint, 441 ; as a novelist, 462 
and see 54, 404, 420, 442, 463. 

Alger, William Rounseville (1823- ) 

55- 
Allan, John, foster-father of Poe 

230-232. 
Allen, Elizabeth Ann Akers (1S32- ) 

50, 446. 
Allston, Washington, 27^ Z9> 4^- 
America, how far homogeneous, 8 

course of its intellect and action 

31 ; poetry, 45 ; viilieii, 48. 
America, Poetry of, its rise the sub 

ject of this work, 1,4; historic sig- 



nificance, 2 ; conditions affecting it, 
11-25; its barren colonial period, 
12-16; Revolutionary period, 16; 
early Republican period, 16-25 ; 
first real school, 28-30 ; effect of 
Civil War, 29 ; review of its evo- 
lution from early times to the vigor 
of the recent school, 31-61 ; long 
subsidiary to other literature, 31 ; 
sectional differentiation, 37 ; pseu- 
do-American, 42, 43 ; School of Na- 
ture, 45-47 ; national and domestic, 
48, 49 ; religious, 50 ; culture, phil- 
osophic, artistic, etc., 51-59, — 
Whitman decries same, 60 ; review 
of existing conditions and specu- 
lation as to future, 435-476; early 
and later characteristics distin- 
guished, 459 ; promise of the future, 
476 ; and see Introduction. 
Americanism, in what consisting, 5- 
10 ; Grant White's statement, 5 ; 
readily distinguished, 5-10 ; phys- 
ical, 5 ; mental, etc., 6-8 ; incom- 
pleteness, 7 ; composite, 7, 8 ; its 
value, 8 ; foreign recognition, 8, 9 ; 
sectional and local types, 9, 10 ; 
the new Americanism, 10 ; emo- 
tional traits, 29 ; pseudo-literary, 
42, 43 ; Saxon quality of, 48 ; Bry- 
ant's, 66 ; types of, 95, 99, 100 ; rec- 
ognized traits, 96 ; question of a 
"national " and " thoroughly Amer- 
ican " poet, 96, 97 ; Whittier's, III ; 



480 



INDEX. 



Emerson's, 159 ; necessary to a com- 
prehension of that poet, 159 ; Whit- 
man's, 166, 353, 354, 383, 384 ; Whit- 
man on " These States," 358 ; Long- 
fellow's share in, 180, 182, — his 
American idyls, 195-203, etc., etc. ; 
not in the form, but the spirit, of 
verse, 289 ; American fondness for 
wildwood scenes, 318 ; Lowell's, 
346 ; American love of travel, 400 ; 
of our miscellaneous verse, 456 ; 
present growth of, 473 ; and see 
220, also Nationality , etc. 

American Homestead, see Domesticity. 

American Literature, History of, Ty- 
ler's, 32-34. 

*' American Review, The," 236. 

Among my Books, Lowell's, ist & 2d 
series, 327. 

Anapestic Verse, Swinburne's, 195 ; 
and hexameter, 196. 

Ancestral Feeling, Holmes's, 299. 

"* Ancient Mariner, The," Coleridge's, 
118, 251. 

Andromeda, Kingsley's, 196, 197. 

" Annuals," " Souvenirs," etc., 42, 43. 

Antique, the, Grecian disregard of 
Landscape, 45, 46 ; Bryant's Ho- 
meric quality, 84 ; not reproduced 
in English hexameter verse, 196; 
pseudo-classical verse, Longfellow's 
" Pandora," 204 ; its method com- 
pared with the modern, 311, 312; 
esoteric feeling, 369. 

Antislavery Conflict, Bryant's warfare 
against slavery, 92 ; Whittier's part 
in, 104-106, 124; poetry of, 112, — 
Whittier's, 121, 127, — Longfellow's, 
121, 191 ; The Antislavery Declara- 
tion, 130 ; Holmes's attitude, 298, 
— Lowell's, 310 ; importance of, 100. 

Apothegms, Holmes's, 292. 

Aristophanes, 332, 

Aristotle, 142. 



Arnold, Edwin, 465. 

Arnold, Elizabeth, mother of Poe, 230. 

Arnold, George, 59, 442. 

Arnold, Matthew, on simplicity, 78 ; 
on translating Homer, 89 ; on hex- 
ameter verse, 197, 198 ; on transla- 
tion, 211 ; on Emerson, 297, and 
Lowell, 339-341 ; suggestive poems 
of, 340 ; and see 170. 

Arrian, 142. 

Art, its order of development, 46 ; 
" Art for Art's sake," 48, 240, 263, 
459 ; national quality, 98 ; devotion 
required, 105 ; its method, compared 
with that of Philosophy, 134; Emer- 
son's, 135, — his interpretation of, 
148, — his theory of, 149; fitness of 
things, 148, 149 ; sense of, in social 
life, 300 ; compared with Science, 
155; grades of perfection, 159; 
Emerson's Essay on, 170, — his 
chief canon, ib. ; the mirror of 
Longfellow, 216 ; its votaries under 
compulsion, 246 ; indecency out- 
lawed, 366 ; must conform to Na- 
ture's method, 369 ; Benjamin's 
monograph on, 372; Art vs. Arti- 
fice, 386; vs. Experience, 415 ; Tay- 
lor's theory, 415 ; Lessing's law of 
distinctions, 449 ; Lanier's theory of 
composition, 450 ; Expression its 
final purpose, 459 ; its so-called 
"doom," 471 ; canons of, unaltera- 
ble, 476. 

Artificiality, in style, 158 ; Whitman's, 
386, 387 ; of Tennyson's and Long- 
fellow's dramas, 429. 

Art School of poets, 54-58. 

Asceticism, conflict with, 51, — Long- 
fellow's, 181 ; Holmes's protest 
against, 277. 

Aspiration, Taylor's noble ideals, 396, 
430 ; tame ambition of recent poets, 
461. 



INDEX. 



481 



''Atlantic Monthly," 91, 293; edited 
by Lowell, 326 ; and see 409. 

At the Court of King Edwin, Leigh- 
ton's, 454. 

Attractiveness, interesting quality of 
Longfellow's verse, 198. 

Aurelius, Marcus, 142. 

Authorship, as a means of subsistence, 
22, 23, 237 ; defrauded of Interna- 
tional Copyright, 23, 2^; growing 
prestige of American, 463. 

Autocrat of the Breakfast - Table, 
Holmes's, reviewed, 291, 292. 

Aytoun, Prof., 443. 

"Bacchus," Emerson's, 154. 

Bach, 468. 

Background, lack of, in new countries, 
20 ; afforded by Scotland, 21, 22. 

Bacon, 171. 

Ballads and Balladists, Whittier our 
foremost balladist, 11 2-1 14; Long- 
fellow's spirited work, 192; 
Holmes's, 282; Taylor's Califor- 
nian Ballads, 403. 

Ballads and Other Foe?ns, Longfellow, 
189-192, 

Balzac, 470 ; and Poe, 258. 

Barlow, Joel, 36. 

Barton, Bernard, 113. 

Bates, Charlotte Fiske (1838- ), 446. 

Baudelaire, Charles, 65. 

Bay Psalm Book, 33. 

Beauty, and use, law of, 152 ; sense of, 
in America quickened by Longfel- 
low, 182 ; Longfellow's love of, 
224 ; Poe's devotion to, 228, 263, 
264, — his sense of, compared with 
Keats's, 263 ; " The Rhythmical 
Creation of," 249. 

"Becket," Tennyson's, 467. 

Beckford, William, 252. 

"Bedouin Song," Taylor, 408, 413. 

Beecher, H. W., a saying of, 249. 

31 



Beers, Henry Augustin (1847- )>443' 

Beethoven, 468. 

Behavior, Emerson's treatises on, 175. 

"Bells, The," Poe's, 237, 244. 

Benjamin, Park, 41. 

Benjamin, S. G. W., on originality in 
art, 372. 

Benton, Joel (1832- ), 360, 443. 

Bible, the, Longfellow on hexameters 
in our version, 199; see also 371. 

Bierstadt, Albert, 46. 

Biglow Papers, The, Lowell's, 118, 
Zoz, 321-325 (2d series, 323), 457. 

" Bion, Epitaph of," 176. 

Bird, Robert Montgomery, 57. 

Bishop, William Henry, 463. 

Blake, William, studied by Whitman, 
371, 378; and see 395. 

Blank- verse, Stoddard's, 58 ; original 
style of Bryant's, 71 ; Bryant's, 79- 
81 ; the test of a vigorous poet, 79; 
the American type, 79 ; its ineffi- 
ciency for Homeric translation, 86- 
91; Bryant's and Tennyson's, 86; 
Prof. Lewis on, 90 ; Emerson's, 167; 
Poe not a master of, 258 ; Lowell's, 
342; Whitman's objection 10,374; 
its nobility, 374 ; Parke Godwin on, 
ib. ; Taylor's, 405 ; and see 377. 

Bloede, Gertrude ("Stuart Sterne") 
{1845- ), 446. 

Blood, Henry Ames (1838- ), 443. 

Boccaccio, 114, 208. 

Bohemianism, 235. 

Boker, George Henry, his dramas and 
lyrics, 57 ; friendship with Taylor 
and Stoddard, 404 ; and see 54, 56, 
192, 439' 468. 

Boner, John Henry (1845- )' 45'^- 

Bookishness, Longfellow's, 215; 
Holmes's reading, 297 ; Southey's, 

407- 
Book of Romances, Taylor's, 404. 
Boston, Holmes the laureate of, 284 



482 



INDEX. 



— poet of her upper class, 300 ; and 

see New Ejtgland. 
Boswell, 296. 
Botta, Anne Charlotte Lynch {18- ), 

50- 
Boyesen, Hjalmar Hjorth, 442. 

Bradford, William, 34. 
Bradley, Mary (1835- )> 44^- 
Bradstreet, Anne, 33, 277. 
" Brahma," Emerson's, 149. 
Brainard, John Gardiner Calkins, 38, 

104. 
Breeding, Holmes on, 299, 
Bridal of Pennacook^ Whittier's, 11 1. 
Briggs, Charles Frederick, his article 

on Poe, 229. 
British Poets, Victorian, lacking in 

home-sentiment, 48 ; miscellaneous, 

compared with American, 456 ; and 

see 458, 459. 
Brook, The, Wright's, 443. 
Brooks, Charles Timothy, 55 
Brooks, Maria Gowen, 43. 
Brown, Charles Brockden, 40. 
Brown, J. Appleton, 46. 
Brownell, Henry Howard, 49, 360. 
Browning, Mrs,, akin to Whittier, 129; 
. and Poe's use of the repetend and 

refrain, 245 ; and Poe, 250 ; and see 

91, 112, 146, 150, 256, 307, 436, 444, 

458. 

Browning, Robert, disciples of, 168 ; 
and Poe, 258; and see 56, 91, 155, 
180, 220, 341, 389, 429, 436, 447. 

Bryant, William Cullen, his kinship 
with our early landscape painters, 
47, 68 ; a poet of liberty, 48 ; review 
of his life and writings, 62-94 ; feel- 
ing excited by his death, 62 ; his 
birth, 62 ; honors, 63 ; type of citi- 
zenship, 63 ; as man and poet, 63 ; 
his republicanism, 64 ; mental and 
moral traits, 64 ; worldly success, 
64; how far conventional, 65 ; a pic- 



turesque bard, 65; his long career, 
its bearing on his work, 65, 66 ; 
American quality, 66 ; Emerson on, 
66 ; influenced by Wordsworth, 67 ; 
as a poet of Nature, 67-69 ; excel- 
ling in Tone and breadth of treat° 
ment, 68 ; lack of scientific vision, 
69; his limitations, 69-71; inflexi- 
bility, 69 ; reticence, 70 ; lack of 
passion, humor, individual manner, 
70, 71; formal verse, 70; blank- 
verse style, 7 1 ; scant range of dic- 
tion, 71, 76, ']'] ; a child of our early 
period, 72 ; The Embargo^ 72 ; 
" Thanatopsis " and other pieces, 
72 ; effect upon Longfellow, etc., 
72 ; The Ages, Poems, The Fountain, 
etc.. White-footed Deer, etc., 73 ; il- 
lustrated editions, 73 ; English ap- 
proval, 73 ; Thirty Poe?ns, 73, 74 ; 
his life and pursuits, 74 ; distaste for 
the law, 74 ; absorption in journal- 
ism, 75; prose writings, orations, 
etc., 75-93 ; not devoted to song, 75 ; 
sincerity, 76 ; effect of early studies 
on his diction, 76 ; pure and simple 
style, 77 ; compared to Webster, 77 ; 
"Everett's eulogy on, 78 ; his favorite 
measures, 78-80 ; iambic-quatrains, 
78, 79; "A Day Dream," 79; his 
blank-verse, 79, 80, — in Thanatop- 
sis, 80 ; blank-verse poems of nat- 
ure, 80; blank-verse contemplative 
poems, 80 ; fine lyrical pieces, 80, 
81; "elemental" quality of his 
song, 81 ; high imagination, 81 ; 
various imaginative passages, 81, 
82 ; master of the early American 
School, 82 ; lack of variety, 83 ; his 
fancy, 83 ; Homeric translations, 83- 
91 ; merits of his Iliad and Odyssey, 
84 ; his rendering compared with 
Lord Derby's, etc., 84 ; idiomatic 
style, 85, 86; Latinism, 85, 91 j 



IXDEX. 



483 



choice of measure, 87-91 ; transla- 
tions from the Spanish, 91 ; a poet 
of freedom and human rights, 91, 92 ; 
his poem on " Shivery," 92 ; his 
death, 93 ; Bryant on Whittier, 104 ; 
on hexameter verse, 197 ; and see 
yi, 3S, 40, 54, 55. 116, 188, 314, 317, 
325, 328, 374, 390, 399, 402, 411, 417, 

436- 
Buchanan, Robert, 360. 
Bucolic Verse — eclogues, Lowell's 

" Biglow Papers," 321-325 ; and see 

Bigloiv Papers, etc. 
Buddhism, modern, 364 ; success of 

" The Light of Asia," 465. 
Btiildijig of the Ship, Longfellow's, 

207. 
Bunner, H. C. (iS- ), merit of his 

Airs from Arcady, 44S. 
Burlesque, Lowell's, in Biglow Papers, 

322 ; and see Satire. 
Burns, influence on Whittier, 102 ; and 

see 103, 115, 116, 321, 323, 414. 
Burroughs, John, on Whittier, 117 j 

on Whitman, 3S7 ; and see 153,360, 

386. 
Bushnell, Frances Louisa (18- ), 446. 
Butcher, S. H., 89. 
Butler, Samuel, 325. 
Butler, William Allen, 59. 
Butterworth, Hezekiah, 443. 
Byles, Mather (1706-88), 34, 277. 
Byron, as a poet of nature, 69 ; influ- 
ence of, 452 ; and see 70, 146, 227, 

239, 267, 289, 327,385, 399,407, 411- 

Cable, George Washington, 98, 
201, 451, 463 

^ Calaynos," Boker's, 404. 

Cambridge, Mass., its colonial poets, 
34; its poets, 51; Longfellow at 
Harvard, 184 ; and Longfellow^'s 
translation of Dante, 209 ; and see 
276, 326. 



Campbell, 289, 411. 

Canning, on "dactylics," 198; see 277 

Caprice, Lowell's, 331. 

Carleion, Henry Guy, 469. 

Carleton, William, 453, 455. 

Carlyle, influence on Whitman, 355; 

and see 166, 328, 383, 422, 424. 
Carter, Robert, 310. 
Gary, Alice (1820-71), 50. 
Cary, Phoebe (1824-71), 50. 
Gary, Henry Francis, his translation 

of Dante, 211. 
"Cassandra Southwick," Whitticr's, 

107, 112. 
Caste, and criticism, 220. 
Cathedral, The, Lowell's, 342. 
Catholicity, Lowell's, 306. 
Gayley, translator of Dante, 212. 
" Cedarcroft," Taylor's home, 418. 
Ce7itennial Cantata, Lanier's, 450. 
Centennial Editiofi, WHiitman's, 354, 

362. 
"Centennial Hymn," Whittier's, 125. 
Century Club, the, 66. 
Cervantes, 259, 338. 
Chadwick, John White (1840- ), 50. 
"Chambered Nautilus, The," 

Holmes's, 286, 292. 
Channing, Edward Tyrrel, 41, 138. 
Channing, William Ellery, D. D., 52, 

122, 126, 138, 184. 
Channing, William Ellery (the poet), 

Poe on, 168 ; and see 52. 
Chapman, George, his " Iliads," 88, — 

"Odysseys," 89; and see 332,334, 

374- 
Chasteness, of Poe's writings, 266. 
Chaucer, his narrative verse, 289; 

Lowell on, 332; and see 76, 114, 

208. 
Chaucerian Verse, 89. 
Cheney, John Vance, 443. 
Chenier, Andre, 268. 
Child, Lydia Maria (1802-80), 41 



484 



INDEX. 



" Children of Adam " and other sex- 
ual poems by Whitman, 366-371. 

*' Children of the Lord's Supper, 
The," Longfellow's translation, 189. 

Chivers, Dr., 250. 

" Christabel," Coleridge's, 251, 

Christus^ Longfellow's, 204. 

Chroniclers, the early, 34. 

Church, Frederick E., 46. 

Churchill, 303. 

Citizenship, Bryant a type of Amer- 
ican, 63. 

"City in the Sea, The," Poe's, 237, 
242. 

Civil War, historic importance of, 
100 ; Holmes's poems of, 298, — 
Lowell's, 323-325 ; Whittier's part 
in, 100 ; Whitman's poems of, 362 ; 
and see 29, 95, 397, 437. 

Class-feeling, Whitman's, 356, 384. 

Classicism, pseudo, 456 ; and see The 
Antique. 

Class-poems, collegiate, — Emerson's, 
138 ; Holmes's, 283 ; Lowell's, 309. 

Clemm, Mrs. Maria, Poe's mother-in- 
law, 232, 237. 

Clemm, Virginia, wife of Poe, 232, 

235- 
Clifford, Prof. W. K., 360. 

Clough, Arthur Hugh, his hexameters, 
196, 198 ; and see 336, 339. 

Clymer, Ella Dietz (i8- ), 446. 

Cole, Thomas, 46, 68. 

Coleridge, " Hymn in the Vale of 
Chamouni," 80 ; and Poe, 247 ; mel- 
ody of, 251; and see 40, iii, 245, 

249> 327, 38I' 451- 
Coles, Abraham (1812- ), an eigh- 
teenth-century poet, 300; and see 

So» 55- 
" Collegian, The," 279. 

Collins, *' Dirge in Cymbeline," 79 1 

and see 71, 114, 239. 

olonialism, surviving traces of, 10 ; 



restrictive force, 13-16 ; different 
effects of, on poetry and painting, 
14; pedantry, 15; imitativeness, 15; 
Holmes's, 299 ; Dr. Coles an inher- 
itor of, 300. 

Colonial Period (i6o7-i7b5), Tyler's 
Review of, 32 - 34 ; its Puritan 
rhymesters, 33 ; aspect in Virginia, 
34, — in the Middle Colonies, 34; 
reflected in Holmes's work, 275. 

Columbiad, The, Barlow's, 36. 

Commemoration Ode, Lowell's, 343, 
364, 427. 

Commonplace, the, diffusion of, 18, 
42, 43 ; Poe's revolt against, 252. 

Composition, Emerson's method of, 
160. 

Compression, rhythmical, unique in 
Emerson, 163. 

Conant, Helen Stevens ( 1839- ), 454. 

Conant, Samuel Stillman (1831- ), - 

443- 

Conceits, abundant in Lowell, 333 ; 
and see 314. 

Concord, Emerson at, 138, 139 ; social 
atmosphere of, 156; Whitman's re- 
lations to, 355; and see 51, 52, 323, 

341. 
Conduct of Life, The, Emerson's, 171, 

175- 
Cone, Helen Gray (1859- ), 447. 

Connecticut, poets of, 38. 

" Conqueror Worm, The," Poe's, 245. 

Conrad, Robert Taylor, 41, 57. 

Conscientiousness, artistic, a requi- 
site, 107, 109. 

Conservatism, pronounced in Holmes, 
276, 298. 

Constitutional Period, 36. 

Construction, Emerson's lack of, 159 ; 
Lowell's early diffuseness, 314; of 
more import than decoration, 459 ; 
and see 336. 

Conventionalism, Whitman's protest 



IXDEX. 



485 



against, 56, 357, 383 ; Bryant's, 65 ; 

its value, 78. 
Conversations on Some of the Old Poets, 

Lowell's, 326. 
Conviction, need of, 472. 
Conway, Moncure Daniel, 360. 
Cooke, John Esten (1S30- ), 54, 

Cooke, Philip Pendleton, 38. 

Cooke, Rose Terry (1827- ), 49, 50, 

445- 
Coolbrith, Ina Donna (18- ), 446. 
Cooper, James Fenimore, 39, 40, 42, 

"Coplas de Manrique," Longfellow's, 
184. 

Copyright, International, 23-25, 474 ; 
disastrous effect of its absence upon 
English authors, 24, — upon Amer- 
ican, 24, 25. 

Cosmopolitan, or composite, poets, 52- 
58 ; New York group, 53 ; South- 
ern, 54; Longfellow, 218. 

Cotton, John, 34. 

"Cotter's Saturday Night, The," 
Burns's, 117. 

" Cotton Boll, The," Timrod's, 449. 

Country Life; effect on poets, 115; 
compared with civic life, 155. 

"Country Lovers, The," Fessenden's, 

323. 455- 

« Courtin', The," Lowell's, 323. 

Courtship of Miles Stand ish^ The, 
Longfellow's, 195, 216 ; reviewed, 
203. 

Cowper, 67, 71, 76, 84, 86. 

Coxe, Arthur Cleveland, 50. 

Cranch, Christopher Pearse, 52 ; trans- 
lation of The Aeneid, 55 ; Poe's 
strictures on, 168. 

Crawford, F. Marion, 463. 

Criticism, an aid to development, 3 ; 
long defective in America, 25 ; its 
goal, 26, 223 ; Emerson his own 



best censor, 169, 170; extremes of 
praise and blame, 226 ; Poe as a 
critic, 255-257; Miss Fuller's, 256; 
by force of arms, 257 ; contempo- 
rary judgment difficult, 274; Low- 
ell's test of the poet, 315, — his 
critical faculty and ways, 326, 334- 
33S, — strictures on his prose, 328, 
329 ; " creative," 328 ; the debate 
over Whitman, 350-352, 360; test 
here applied to him, 351, 367 ; ' Put- 
nam " on " Leaves of Grass,'' 354, 
355 ; Alden on Whitman, 381 ; com- 
parative, 388 ; Whitman's strictures 
on modern poetry and poets, 389 ; 
Taylor as a critic, 421 ; progress in, 
471. 

*' Croakers, The," 39. 

Croly, George, 280, 411. 

Cross, Mrs. ("George Eliot"), 458. 

Croswell, William (1804-51), 50. 

Ctdprit Fay, The, Drake's, 40. 

Culture, American, 50, 51; as an aid 
to genius, 109, 135 ; Lowell a type 
of, 305, 342 ; other examples, 305 ; 
in New England, 306; the burden 
of "over-culture," 320, 341, 342. 

Curtis, George William, 409. 

Cynics, the, 143. 

Dactylic Verse, Longfellow's, 199. 

Dana, Charles Anderson, 402. 

Dana, Richard Henr}', on Bryant, 67 ; 

and see 37, 39, 75. 
Dance of Death, The, Miss Lazarus's, 

447- 

Dante, American translations of, by 
Parsons, Norton, and Longfellow, 
55; Longfellow's, 188, 209-213,^ 
its characteristics, 213; Lowell on, 
337 ; and see 455. 

Darley, George, 411. 

Darwin, Charles, 153. 

"Day Dream, A," Bryant's, 79, 



486 



INDEX. 



Dayman, translator of Dante, 210. 

" Death of Slaverj^, The," Bryant's, 92. 

Decadence, Poetic, recent fears of, 
436; interregnum noticeable, 457. 

Decoration, avoided by Bryant, 77 ; 
Kensington-stitch verse, 192 ; luxu- 
riant and oriental in Poe, 264; dec- 
orative spirit of the new school, 458, 
459 ; art and artifice, 459, 460 ; its 
lowest grade, 472 ; and see Society - 
Verse and Introduction. 

De Foe, 173. 

Deirdre, Joyce's, 444, 

De Kay, Charles, his JVimrod, Esther, 
Hesperus, etc., 442. 

Delicacy, not inconsistent with virility 
and strength, 369. 

Delphic Days, Snider's, 198, 454. 

Democi^acy, "of the future," Whit- 
man's, 56 ; Whitman on, 383 ; poets 
of, 385. 

" Democratic Vistas," Whitman's, 363, 

389- 

De Musset, 146, 155, 227. 

De Quincey, Thomas, 53. 

Derby, Edward, Lord, on hexameter, 
196 ; and see 84, 91. 

Derivatives, faulty use of, 212. 

Descriptive Poetry, effect of our land- 
scape upon our poets, 14, 28, 45-47 ; 
not found in primitive races, 45, 46 ; 
antique, 46 ; secondary to the emo- 
tional and dramatic, 46 ; of Bryant 
and his followers, 47, 68, 73, 80 ; 
Whitman's, 60, 379, 380 ; Whittier's, 
115- 120; penetrative subtlety of 
Emerson's, 151,152; Longfellow's 
artificiality, 216, — but a true poet 
of the sea, 217 ; freshness and spon- 
taneity of Lowell's, 317-319, 341 ; 
and see 47, 173, 443. 

De Senectute, 83. 

" Deserted Village, The," Goldsmith's, 
117. 



Detail, in poetry and art, Bryant's lack 
of, 68, 69. 

De Vere, Mary Ainge (1839- ), 446. 

Devotion to poetry, Longfellow's, 183 ; 
question of, 409. 

Dialect Verse, Hay's, 453 ; writers in 
Eastern, Middle, and Western dia» 
lects, -455; plantation - verse, zA / 
and see 5, 59. 

Dickens, 328. 

Diction, limited range of Bryant's, 71 ; 
of early English poets, 76 ; of Pope, 
Cowper, etc., 76; of Tennyson and 
Swinburne, 76, 77 ; chiefly formed in 
youth, 76 ; Saxon and Latin, 85, — 
use of by Bryant, 85, 86; Emerson's 
choice of words, 152; Longfellow's 
later, 213 ; Lowell's peculiarities, 
315; Whitman's original, 378, — 
his faulty verbiage, ib. 

Didacticism, our early verse-makers 
15 ; of the Lake School, 51 ; con 
flict with, by Poe, etc.,. 56, 249, 263 
not in Emerson's verse, 150 ; defini 
tion of, and why it repels us, 150 
and see 450. 

Dietz, Ella, see Clymer, E. D. 

Dilettantism, 27. 

Dinsmore, Robert (i 757-1836), 116. 

Disciples, Emerson's, 158; Whit- 
man's, 360. 

Disraeli, vulgarity of " Lothair," 261. 

Divine Cofjiedy, The, Longfellow's 
translation, 188, — reviewed, 209- 
213; various translations of, ib. ; 
qualities essential to an ideal ver- 
sion, 210, 213 ; and see Dante. 

Divines, colonial, 34. 

Doane, George Washington (1799- 
1859), 50. 

Dobson, Austin, 342. 

Dodge, Mary Mapes (1838- ), 446. 

Domesticity, American homestead, 17^ 
102 ; home-life depicted by the East 



INDEX. 



487 



era poets, 49; Longfellow's, 221; 

and see 123. 
Domett, Alfred, 415. 
Dore, Gustave, 258. 
Dorgan, John Aylmere, 442. 
"Dorothy," Munby's, 198, 454. 
*' Dorothy Q.," Holmes's, 285. 
Dorr, Julia Caroline Ripley (1825- ), 

50. 
Doudan, X., on poverty, 268 ; and see 

347- 

Dowden, Edward, on Emerson, 17S; 
on Lowell, 305 ; and see 360. 

Drake, Joseph Rodman, influence on 
Halleck, 40 ; and see 39, 75, 280. 

Drama and D ramatists, Godfrey's work, 
T^T^ ; Tyler and Dunlap, 36 ; Gris- 
wold on, 57 ; plays of Bird, Conrad, 
Longfellow, Willis, Sargent, Math- 
ews, and Boker, 57 ; merits and de- 
fects of Longfellow's dramatic poe- 
try, 204-207 ; rarity of the dramatic 
gift, 204 ; Taylor's dramas, 42S-432 ; 
poetry's highest form, 428 ; requi- 
sites for success in, 429 ; Fawcett, 
441 ; dramas by Leighton, Young, 
etc., 454 ; a symptom of national 
maturity, 466 ; present need and 
prospects of, 466-469 ; stage-plays, 
past and present, 466-468 ; question 
of text, action, and accessories, 467 ; 
audience and plapvright, 468 ; 
town-life favorable to the dramatic 
poet, 468 ; recent dramatists, 469. 

Dramatic Quality, absent in our earlier 
periods, 66 ; Emerson's lack of, 
156, 157 ; Lowell's, 341 ; needed for 
a revival of interest in poetry, 466. 

Drayton, Michael, 192. 

"Drum-Taps," Whitman's, 362. 

Dryden, 89, 331.335- 

Duflield, Samuel Willoughby (1843- )> 

55, 443- 
Dulness, Holmes on, 292, 



" Dunciad, The," 289. 

Dunlap, William, 36, 466. 

Durand, A. B., 46, 68. 

Duyckincks, The (Evert A. and 

George L.), 32, 41. 
Dwight, Timothy, 36, 325. 

Earnestness, 129 j strength of Low 
ell's convictions, 312-314. 

" Earthly Paradise, The," Morris's, 
209. 

Eastman, Charles Gamage, 49. 

Eccentricity, a weakness of transcen- 
dental poetry, 167-169. 

Echo Chib, The, Taylor's, 422. 

Eclogues, 115. 

Edwards, Jonathan, 34, 130, 296. 

Egan, Maurice Francis, 444. 

Eggleston, Edward, 463. 

Egoism, of the minor transcendental- 
ists, 147; dangers of, 271; Whit- 
man's, 390. 

Eighteenth-Century Style, Bryant's, 
70, 71 ; Holmes's a survival, not a 
renaissance, 275, 276; modern a-la- 
mode verse, 275 ; knee-buckle verse, 
281 ; Dr. Coles, 300. 

Elegiac Poetry, "The North Shore 
Watch," 461. 

" Elegy on a Shell," Dr. Mitchill's, 286. 

Elemental quality, characteristic of 
Bryant's verse, 81. 

Elizabethan Period, and poets, influ- 
ence of, 56, 469 ; the lyrists, 374 ; 
and see 76, 188. 

Ellsworth, Erastus Wolcott, 52. 

Elsie Venner, Holmes's, 294. 

Embargo, The, Bryant's, 72. 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, his landscape. 
47 ; master of the Concord group, 
52 ; eulogy of Bryant, (^6 ; review 
of his life, philosophy, and works, 
133-179 ; his indecision between the 
methods of philosophy and art, 133, 



4-88 



INDEX. 



134; ideal prose and verse, 134; his 
natural disciples, 134; felicity of 
touch, 135; a single purpose, 135; 
essentially a poet, 136; office, 137; 
tributes to his genius, 137 ; order of 
intellect, 137 ; birth, ancestry, train- 
ing, 138; early Unitarianism, 138; 
retirement from the Church, 138 ; 
after-life and career, 139 ; pupils 
and associates, 139 ; Naticre^ 140 ; 
personal traits and bearing, 140 ; 
death, 141 ; his philosophy analyzed, 
141-147 ; optimism, 141 ; freedom 
from dogma, 142 ; an idealist and 
eclectic, 142 ; morals, 142 ; sense of 
real life, 142, 143 ; Plato his early 
guide, 143 ; his likeness to Plotinus, 
144 ; innate wisdom, 145 ; transcen- 
dental method, 146 ; influence on pu- 
pils, 147 ; a liberator, 147 ; considered 
as a poet, 148-171 ; Poems, 1847, — 
May-Day — Foems, 1876,148; view 
of art, 148, 149 ; " Brahma" and the 
universal Soul, 149; as a lyric poet, 
150; Margaret Fuller's criticism on, 
150, 160; not "didactic," 150; on 
Nature's hidden trail, 151 ; " Wood- 
notes," "Forerunners," 151, 152; 
"The Problem," "May-Day," 152; 
genius for diction and epithet, 152, 
153 ; scientific intuition and pre- 
science, 153-155 ; " The Sphinx," 
153 ; a seer of evolution, 154 ; view 
of Science and Art, 155; his lim- 
itations, of range, passion, action, 
155-157; love-poetry, 157; patriotic 
verse, 157 ; a la3'er on of hands, 
158 ; E. and Rossetti, 158 ; metrical 
style, 1 58-161 ; best understood by 
Americans, 159; his melody, 159; 
deficient sense of proportion and 
construction, 159; a nonconformist, 
160; unique lyrics, 160; gift for 
"saying things," 161; famous pas- 



sages in his poems, 161-163 ; rhyth- 
mical compression, 163 ; lyrical 
freedom, 164, 165; imaginative ex- 
pression, ib. ; " Threnody " and 
"Merlin," 165; Emerson and Whit- 
man, 166 ; his favorite poets and 
measures, 166 ; Orientalism, 167 ; 
blank-verse, ib. ; changes observable 
in his style, 167-169; early blem- 
ishes, ib. ; his own best censor, 169- 
171 ; his artistic canons, 170; prose- 
writings, 171-176 ; mutual likeness of 
his prose and verse, 171 ; his essays 
compared with those of Bacon, Car- 
lyle, Landor, Montaigne, etc., 171, 

172 ; prose-style, 172-174 ; apo- 
thegms, 172 ; idiomatic English, 

173 ; rhythm and imagery of his 
prose, 173, 174; secular essays, on 
the Conduct of Life, etc., 175; Par- 
nassus, 175 ; summary of his traits, 
176-179; compared with Longfel- 
low, 177, 178 ; his conception of the 
future bard, 179 ; Holmes's por- 
traiture of, 296 ; Arnold on, 297 ; 
view of Whitman, 349, 359 ; influ- 
ence on Whitman, 355, — on the 
new choir, 443; and see 12, 44, 98, 
106, no, 116, 118, 129, 130, 180, 
216, 220, 223, 263, 279, 300, 304, 
336, 342, ZSo, 351, 363, 380, 389, 
390, 424, 436, 444, 457. 

Emersonian School, 145-147, 168, 169. 

England, Taine on, 48. 

English, Thomas Dunn, 41. 

English heroic verse, Holmes's mas- 
tery of, 288-290, — his opinion of, 
289 ; as written by Chaucer, Hunt, 
Keats, Pope, and others, 289. 

English Language, the, Bryant's use 
of, 84 ; consonantal quality, 91 ; 
Emerson's mastery of, 173; Lowell's 
English, 330, 331 ; beauty, strength, 
and copiousness, 475 ; and see 411. 



INDEX. 



489 



English 7r«//^, Emerson's, 171, 175; 
idiomatic English of, 173. 

Ennui, a national characteristic, 9 ; 
the nurse of invention, 273. 

"Enoch Arden," Tennyson's, 117. 

Entailed Hat, The, Townsend's, 298. 

Environment, law of, 3 ; factors mod- 
ifying it, 3 ; early American, ad- 
verse to ideality, 75 ; Taylor's early, 
398, — later, 416. 

Epic quality, of '* Hiawatha," 202. 

Epictetus, 142. 

Epicurus, 142. 

Epigrams, Holmes's, 297 ; Lowell's 
pointed sayings, 332, 333. 

Epithets, Emerson the master of, 153, 
164, 165 ; Whitman's, 379. 

Equipment, Poe's, 260, 261 ; Taylor's, 
410. 

Essays, Lowell's, 330-338 ; and see 
Emerson, R. W. 

Essays (First and Second Series), Em- 
erson's, 171. 

Esther, de Kay's, 442. 

Ethics, Longfellow's, 221. 

"Euphorion," Taylor's, 413. 

Etireka, Poe's, 262. 

Evangel, The, Coles's, 300. 

Evatigeline, Longfellow's, scenic and 
idyllic, 20; reviewed, 195-201; 
choice, management, and success of 
its measure, 195-199; Poe on, 196; 
Arnold on, 197, 198; the flower of 
American idyls, 200, 201 ; and see 
90, 117, 216, 426,457- 

" Evening Revery, An," Bryant's, 93. 

Everett, Edward, on Bryant's poetry, 
78 ; and see 138, 283. 

Evolution, 153, 154. 

Expression, all modes free to the poet, 
373; when involved, in Taylor, 412. 

Extravagance, of genius, 389. 

Fable for Critics, A, Lowell's, 325. 



Facility, Taylor's, 412. 

Faith, essential to high art, 128. 

"Fall of the House of Usher, The," 
Poe's, 237 ; compared to Brown- 
ing's "Childc Roland," 258. 

Fame, at its best, 137; Longfellow's, 
208 ; Poe's, 225, 227 ; as affected 
by biographers and critics, 265 ; 
measured in the end by actual prod- 
uct, 272 ; contemporary judgment 
difficult, 274 ; fame, reputation, no- 
toriety, etc., Whitman's, 349, 350, 

394- 

Fancy, Bryant's, 83; Whittier's, 119; 
Holmes's, 281. 

Fantasy, Poe's use of the fantastic, 258. 

Fantasy and Passion, Fawcett's, 441. 

Fashion, in Art, 39 ; Whittier's style, 
no ; its law, and effect on Art, 273 ; 
Whitman's revival of the prophetic 
dithyramb, 371 ; ephemeral vogue 
of novel forms, 460 ; demand for 
prose fiction, 463. 

Faust, Taylor's Translation of, 422- 
425 ; rapid execution, 422 ; its 
method, 423 ; characteristics, 423 ; 
the " Dedication," ib. ; notes, com- 
mentary, etc., 424 ; and see 204. 

Fawcett, Edgar, his Fantasy and Pas- 
sio7i. Song a7td Story, etc., 441,. 

Felicitous passages, examples from 
Emerson, 161-163. 

Female Poets, American, early group, 
50, — a Scotch critic on, 444, — their 
relative position, 444, — compared 
with British, 444, — general advance, 
445, — enumeration of, 445-447, — 
unaffected quality, 447 ; their rela- 
tive excellence a feature, 458. 

Fessenden, Thomas Green (1771 

1837), 323. 455- 
Fiction, Prose. See Novels and Notm 

elists. 
Fields, Annie Adams (1834- ), 51, 445. 



490 



INDEX. 



Fields, James Thomas, 59. 

Filicaja, a sonnet by, 214. 

Finch, Francis Miles ( 1827- ), 49. 

Fireside Travels^ Lowell's, 327, 329. 

First Books, 291. 

FitzGerald, Edward, 184. 

Fletcher, Andrew, on national songs, 

35- 

Folk-lore, 102 ; meagreness of, in the 
New World, 21. 

Foote, Mary Hallock, 463. 

Force, conservation of, 153. 

Ford, translator of Dante, 210, 212. 

Foreign Opinion, how far insincere, 8 ; 
Dowden on Lowell, etc., 305 ; our 
debt to foreign critics, 473. 

Form, value of, in translation, 90 ; fa- 
vorite measures of Emerson, 167; 
poetic forms. Whitman's outcry 
agamst those familiar, 372, — ra- 
tionale of the latter, 373, — depen- 
dent on time, accent, rhythm, etc., 
and based in nature, 372, — Goe- 
the on, 373, — Milton on rhyme, 
374, — blank-verse, 374, — question 
of their endurance, 377, — genius 
master of all forms, 377 ; Poe's use 
of simple ballad-forms, 251 ; all 
forms included in the dramatic, 428 ; 
and see French Forms. 

Formalism, excessive in Whitman, 377, 
386. 

Foster, John, 311. 

Foster, Stephen Collins (1826-64), 49, 

455-^ 
Fouque, 252. 

Fourier, 360. 

" Francesca da Rimini," Boker's, 468. 
Franchise, of the poet, 155, 156. 
Franklin, 305 ; Holmes compared to, 

291. 
" Freeman, The," 105. 
Freiligrath, 423. 
"French Forms," no, 276. 



French quality and influence, 440, 441; 
Poe affected by, 261. 

Freneau, Philip, 35, 36. 

Frere, John Hookham, 277, 443. 

" Frontenac," Parkman's, 97. 

Frothingham, Ellen (1835- )> 55* 

Frothingham, Nathaniel Langdon, 
(1793-1870), 50. 

Frothingham, Octavius Brooks, 
quoted, loi. 

Fuller, Sarah Margaret, on Emerson, 
150, 160, 164; her "Tribune" crit- 
icisms, 256; and see 52, 139, 175. 

" Future, Poetry of the," cannot now 
be produced upon a theory, 375. 

Future of American Poetry, the, 61, 476 

Gallagher, William Davis, 49. 

Garrison, William Lloyd, fellowship 
with Whittier, etc., 103-106; Whit- 
tier's poem on, 122; and see 130. 

Gautier, 441. 

Gay, 342. 

Genius, its exceptional quality, 3 ; la- 
tent, 15; need of excitants, 15; san- 
ity of Bryant's, 64; aided by cul- 
ture, 109, 306 ; Emerson on, 145 ; 
influence of Nature on, 156; more 
than a talent for work, 187 ; tests 
of, 191; interest aroused by, 226; 
priceless rarity of, 269 ; is it a neu- 
rotic disorder, 270 ; q u a 1 i t y of 
Holmes's, 302 ; its self-culture, 307 ; 
Lowell's many-sided and original, 
347 ; is consistent, 368 ; adapts it- 
self to all languages and forms, 377 ; 
paradoxical, 392, 393 ; and see 433, 

438. 
Genre, lyrics and idyls, Longfellow's, 

216 ; Whitman's work, 380. 
" George Eliot." See Cross. 
Georgian Period, 194, 275, 276. 
German influence, on Longfellow, 187 

on Taylor, 422. 



INDEX. 



491 



German Language, 91. 

" Gesta Ronianorum," 215. 

Gifford, R. Swain, 46. 

Gifford, Sanford R., 46. 

Gilder, Ricliard Watson, The Nno 
Day, 442 ; artistic purpose, ib, ; The 
Poet and his Master, ib. ; quoted, 
470. 

Godfrey, Thomas, 33. 

Godwin, Parke, on blank-verse, 374 ; 
and see 400. 

Godwin, William, 252. 

Goethe, and Longfellow, 206 ; quoted, 
221 ; on the value of poetic forms, 
373; and see 129, 147, 153, 155,338, 
420, 422. 

Golden Legend, The, Longfellow's, re- 
viewed, 205-207. 

Goldsmith, 71, 115, 120, 288, 327. 

Goodale, Dora Read (1866- ), 447. 

Goodale, Elaine (1863- ), 447. 

Gookin, Daniel, 34. 

Gothic Feeling. See MedicEvalism. 

Graham, George R., 265, 266, 400. 

" Graham's Magazine," 236, 400. 

Grant, Robert, 443. 

Gray, Thomas, quoted, 65 ; and see 
239, 277. 

" Greece," Wordsworth's, quoted, 53. 

Greek Bucolic Poets, 89. 

Greek Language, of Homer, 85-91. 

Greeley, Horace, on Whittier, 95 ; and 
see 99. 400, 402. 

Green, Joseph, {1706-80), 277. 

Greene, G. W., 210, 213. 

Greenfield Hill, Dwight's, 36. 

Greenough, Sarah Dana Loring 
(1827- ), 50. 

Grimm, Hermann, on Emerson, 134. 

Griswold, Rufus Wilmot, 32 ; satirized 
by Lowell, 43 ; his sketches of au- 
thors, 256; his Memoir and Edition 
of Poe, 265 ; and see 40, 41, 325, 399, 
400. 



Grote, 91. 

Grotesque, the, Poe's passion for, 259. 
Guardian Angel, The, Holmes's, 294. 
Guiney, Louise Imogen (1861- ),447. 

Hadley, James, on Homeric transla- 
tion, 89; on hexameter, 197. 

Hafiz, 167, 279. 

Halleck, Fitz-Greene, a natural lyrist, 
40 ; and see 39, 75, 280. 

Halpine, Charles Graham ("Miles 
O'Reilly") (1829-6S), 59, 444. 

" Ilamadryad, The," Landor's, 311, 
404. 

Hanging of the O-ane, Longfellow's, 
207. 

Hannah Thurston, Taylor's, 421. 

'* Hans Breitmann," Leland's ballads 

of, 455- 

Harmony, natural, Whitman on, 375; 
and see Rhythm. 

Harney, William Wallace, 453. 

Harris, Joel Chandler, 455. 

Harte, Francis Bret, poetry of, 451 ; 
and see 159, 201, 285, 403, 455, 463. 

Harvard University, its early and 
modern sentiment, 308; Lowell s 
ode, 343 ; and see 277, 278. 

"Haunted Palace, The," Poe's, 247. 

Hawthorne, treatment of colonial 
themes, 205 ; compared with Poe, 
254, — with Holmes, 294 ; and see 
no, 183, 229, 238, 263, 325. 

Hawthorne, Julian, 463. 

Hawtrey, Dean, his hexameters, 196; 
and see 89. 

Hay, John, poems of, and dialect-verse, 
453 ; and see 455. 

Hayne, Paul Hamilton, 54, 440, 451 

Hazeltine, Mayo Williamson, cited, 6^ 

"Hebe," Lowell's, 316. 

Hebraism, Whittier's, 130; Whit- 
man's, 353, 371 ; Miss Lazarus'i 
poetry, 447. 



492 



INDEX. 



Hedge, Frederic Henry (1805- ), 50. 

iieine, translations of, by Leland, Laz- 
arus, 55, 447 ; influence on Longfel- 
low, 186, 188 ; and see 146, 227, 263, 

459- 
" Hellenics," Lander's, 404. 
Hemans, Mrs., 43, 112, 399. 
' Hermann and Dorothea," Goethe's, 

117. 
' Hermes, Paul." See Thayer, W. R. 
Hermes, Thayer's, 444. 
Heroism, a quality, not a sentiment, in 

Americans, 21. 
Hesiod, 175, 379. 
Hesperus, de Kay's, 442. 
Hexameter, Greek, aristocratic quality, 

^1 ; splendor, 88 ; rhythmus of, 88- 

90. 
Hexameter, English, Longfellow's, 

195-199; pleasing to popular ear, 

195, 199; wrongly discussed from 
the scholar's point of view, 195-197 ; 
Swinburne on, 195, 196 ; Kingsley's, 

196, 198; Poe's strictures, 196; 
Lord Derby's, 196; discussed by 
Lewis, Bryant, Lang, Hadley, Low- 
ell, Higginson, Stoddard, etc., 197, 
198 ; recent poems in, 197, 198 ; 
accent and quantity, 198 ; Canning 
on, 198; Taylor's, 198, 426; ultimate 
characteristics, 198 ; Biblical hexam- 
eters, 199; and see 89-91. 

" H. H." See Helen M. F. Jackson. 

'Hiawatha, Longfellow's, reviewed, 
201-203 ; measure of, 201, 202 ; 
modelled on " Kalevala," 201 ; suc- 
cessful handling of the Indian tradi- 
tions, 202 ; management of Indian 
dialect and names, 202 ; and see 
III. 

.licks, Thomas, his portrait of Taylor, 
406. 

rligginson, Francis, 34. 

iligginson, Thomas Wentworth, on 



English hexameter, 197 ; on Poe 
and Miss Fuller, 256; and see 52. 

Hillard, George, 41. 

Hillhouse, James Abraham, 38 

Hoffman, Charles Fenno, 41. 

Hoffman, Ernst, 252. 

Hogarth, 275. 

Holland, Josiah Gilbert, 49, 360. 

Holmes, Abiel, 279. 

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Dean of our 
"occasional" poets, 59; review of 
his career and writings, 273-303 ; 
effect of current taste on his popu- 
larity, 274 ; a poet of the old school, 
275; leader of his class, 276; vi- 
vacity, 276 ; a University poet, 276, 
277; disperser of Puritan gloom, 
277; wit and humorist, 277; birth 
and training, 278, 279 ; buoyant na- 
ture, 278; "The Collegian," 279; 
likeness to Dr. Mitchill, 279 ; early 
verse, 280 ; " Old Ironsides," " The 
Last Leaf," etc., 280, 281 ; personal 
traits, 281 ; songs and ballads, 282, 
283 ; rhymed Addresses, 283 ; Poe- 
try, a Metrical Essay, etc., 283 ; 
Class - Poems, 283 ; Boston's lau- 
reate, 284 ; society-verse, 284, 285 ; 
his most ideal poems, 286 ; traits of 
his " occasional pieces," 287 ; eigh- 
teenth-century style and thought, 
288-290 ; use of the rhymed-pentam- 
eter, 288, 289 ; his distinctive gift, 
290 ; prose writings, 291-297 ; Aiito- 
crat of the Breakfast- Table, 291, 292 ; 
the " Atlantic Monthly," 293 ; Pro- 
fessor at the ■ Breakfast-Table, and 
Poet at the Breakfast- Table, 294 ; 
his novels, Elsie Venner, etc., 294, 
295 ; their realism, satire, etc., 295 ; 
an independent thinker, 295; Mis- 
cellaneous Essays, 296; portrayal 
of Emerson, 296 ; epigrammatist and 
proverb-maker, 297 ; his views, 298; 



INDEX. 



493 



conservatism, loyalty, and ancestral 
feeling, 29S-300 ; personal magnet- 
ism, 300 ; sevciitioih birthday, 300 ; 
charm of his recitations, 301 ; tinal 
estimate of, 302, 303 ; and see 51, 
no. 112, 129, 439, 448. 
Homer, qualities of text, S4-91 ; dic- 
tion, '^■] ; dactylic lines, 88 ; rhythm 
and movement, 8S-90 ; and see 175, 

423- 

Homeric translations, Bryant's, 83; 
Derby's, Hunt's, etc.. 84 ; Tenny- 
son's, 86; by Chapman, Pope, 
Hawtrey, Butcher and Lang, etc., 
88, 89 ; opinions of Iladley and 
Arnold, 89, — of Prof. Lewis, 90; 
inetiicacy of blank-verse, 86-91 ; fit- 
ness of " English hexameter," 90, 
91 ; Lord Derby's, 91 ; Voss's Iliad, 
91 ; Longfellow on, 189 ; Longfellow 
not fitted for, 199 ; and see 197, 332. 

Home Pastorals^ Taylor's, 426. 

Home-School, American, question of 
its existence, 4 ; characteristics, 4- 
1 1 ; a growth, 6 ; foreign view of, 8, 
9 ; local sub-divisions, 9 ; its first pe- 
riod clearly defined, 1 1 ; advent of, 
30; growth of, 31-61; earliest 
promise, 37 ; mistaken efforts to- 
ward, 42 ; final evolution, 44 ; should 
be rightly estimated, 60 ; its first 
course ended, 60 ; Whitman's denial 
of, 60 ; Bryant its early master, 82. 

Homilies in verse, Longfellow's, 190. 

Homogeneity, American, 5-10,96, 97, 

474- 
Hood, Thomas, 108, 2S7, 462. 
Hooker, Thomas, 130. 
Hopkinson, Joseph (1770-1842), his 

" Hail Columbia," 36. 
Home, R. H., 415. 
Houghton, George Washington 

Wright, 443. 
Howard, Blanche Willis 463. 



Howard, Bronson (1842- ), 469. 

"Howard Glyndon." See Hearings 
L. R. 

Llowe, Julia Ward, 49, 360. 

Howells, Elizabeth Lloyd (18- ), 50. 

Howells, William Dean, his '"Clem- 
ent," 197 ; compared with Holmes, 
295 ; and see 210, 440, 462, 463. 

Howland, George (1824- ), 55, 454. 

Hoyt, Ralph, 41. 

Htidibras, 35, 325. 

LIudson, Mary Ann Clemmer (1839- 

84), 50. 446. 

Hugo, Victor, cited, 49, 67; "Con- 
flicts " with Nature, etc., 67 ; and 
see 3 SI, 385- 389, 468. 

Humor, of "The Croakers," 40; cf 
American poets, 59 ; absent from 
Bryant's verse — characteristic of 
his speech, 70 ; Poe deficient in, 
258 ; characteristics of genuine, 259 ; 
Poe's theory of, 259; "graveyard" 
humor, 260; Holmes's, 277, 280; 
its tenure in art, 321 ; Poe's and 
Lowell's, 332. 

Humorous Verse, Holmes's, 290; 
Taylor's, 422 ; Harte's, 452 ; Hay's, 
453 ; and see Burlesque and Parody 

Hunt, Leigh, 84, 89, 214, 289, 311, 407 

Hutchinson, Ellen Mackay (18- ) 

447- 
" Hylas," Taylor's, 404. 
Hymnology, see Religions Verse. 
Hyperion, Longfellow's, reviewed, iSc 

186 ; and see 204. 

Iambic-quatrain Verse, Brj'ant's, 

78, 79- 

" Ichabod," Whittier's, 122. 

Ideal, The, love of, a restraint on sen- 
suality 266; the American, 473; 
and see Aspiration. 

Ideality, how retarded, ii, \2, et seg. ; 
incomplete Republicanism opposed 



494 



INDEX. 



to it, 1 6, 17 ; of Emerson's prose 
and verse, 134; Longfellow's, 182; 
popularity dangerous to, 293 ; pres- 
ent neglect of, 458 ; now diverted to 
prose fiction, 461. 

Idyllic Verse, " Evangeline " the type 
and flower of our, 200 ; Longfellow's 
free - hand idyls, 207 ; Whitman's, 
380; Snider's Delphic Days, 454; 
Munby's " Dorothy," ib. ; public 
satiated with, 464; and see 117. 

Idyls of the King, Tennyson's, 202. 

Imagery, Emerson's, 161-163, 174; 
Longfellow's use of metaphors, etc., 
214. 

Imagination, Stoddard's, 58 ; Bryant's 
elemental type, 81, 82 ; Whittier's, 
119; Longfellow's, 191 ; Poe's not of 
the highest order, 258 ; constructive, 
336 ; Whitman's, exemplified, 380, 
381 ; Alden on Whitman's, 381 ; 
recent lack of, 459. 

Impulse, 335. 

Indecency, outlawed of Art, 366; 
Whitman's alleged, 367 ; not a mark 
of virility, 369 ; and see Realism. 

Indian, American, cockney ideals of, 
42 ; poetry of, Whittier, 1 1 1 ; Long- 
fellow's " Hiawatha," 201 - 203 ; 
Schoolcraft, 202 ; of the Knicker- 
bocker poets, 202. 

Indifferentism, recent, 309. 

Individuality, Lowell's, 328, 337 ; 
Whitman's, 362. 

Induction, Poetic, 262. 

Infertility, Bryant's, 70 ; of Poe's lyri- 
cal genius, 240. 

Inflexibility and stiffness, Bryant's, 69. 

Ingelow, Jean, 112. 

Ingram, John H., memoir of Poe, 265. 

Inland States, poets and poetry of the, 
452-454. 

"In Memoriam," Tennyson's, 195; 
stanzaic form of, ib. 



Inness, George, 46, 68. 

Inspiration, belief in, by Whittier and 

Mrs. Browning, 129; Emerson's, 

176, 177 ; and see 472. 
Intellectual Power, Emerson's, 176; 

essential to a great poet, 253 ; qual^ 

ity of Poe's intellect, 254. 
" In the Twilight," Lowell's, 339. 
Invention, and tradition, 179; vs. 

Taste, 239; limits of Poe's, 253. 
" Inward Light," the, Whittier's, I27«. 

129. 
Irish-American Poets, 444. 
Irving, Washington, edits Bryant's 

poems, "j-^ ; and see 39, 40, 401. 
Isolation, "scholar-gypsies," 454. 
" Israfel," Poe's, 248. 
Italian Influence, 442. 

Jackson, Helen Maria Fiske 

("H.H.")! 1831-85), 445- 
James, Henry, Jr., on the Emerson- 

ians, 169; and see 156, 462, 463. 

Jennison, Lucy White {" Owen Inns- 
ley") (1850- ),447. 

Jewett, Sarah Orne, 463. 

yohn Godfreys Fortune, Taylor's, 42 1. 

Johnson, Capt. Edward, 34. 

Johnson, Oliver, on Whittier, 131. 

Johnson, Samuel (1822-82), 50. 

Johnston, Richard Malcolm, 451. 

Jonson, Ben, 167, 392. 

Journalism, and ideality, 27, 29 ; Bry- 
ant's case, 63, — effect of, on his 
genius, 74, 75; Whittier's, 103-105, 
108; effect of, on authorship, 233; 
Taylor's case, 417 ; its aid to the 
poet, 471; and see 326, 397, 437 •_ 

Journey-work, often harmful to genius, 
294 ; and see Market, Literary. 

Joyce, Robert Dwyer, 444. 

Judd, Sylvester, 49. 

Judson, Emily Chubbuck (1817-54^ 

50- 



INDEX. 



495 



"Kalevala," the Finnish epic, 201. 
Kavanagh, Longfellow's, its moral, 

etc., 1S7 ; quoted, 218, 219. 
Keats, on Beauty and Truth, 263 ; and 

see 39, 76, 89, 249, 250, 2S6, 2S9, 

311, 312, 319, 332,402, 459. 
Kennedy, John Pendleton, on Poe, 

252 ; and see 41, 265. 
Kensett, J. F., 68. 
Keramos, Longfellow's, 207. 
Key, Francis Scott (1779-1843), "The 

Star-Spangled Banner," 36. 
Kimball, Harriet McEwen (1834- ), 

50- 
King, Edward, 443. 

King, Bishop Henry, 165. 

Kingsley, his "Andromeda," 90; his 
fine hexameter-verse, 196, 198. 

Kinney, Elizabeth Clementine 
(1810- ), 50. 

Kip, Leonard, 463. 

Knickerbocker Poets — pseudo - In- 
dian Verse, 202 ; and see 39-43. 

Knowles, Sheridan, 468. 

Kossuth, 290. 

"Lady Geraldine's Courtship," 
Mrs. Browning's, and " The Raven," 

245- 
Lake School, the, 51, 249, 313. 

Lamb, 43. 

Landor, Walter Savage, 36, 70, %^, 

137, 167, 172, 249, 267, 289, 308, 311, 

7,^7. 338. 346, 366, 374, 385, 404- 

Landon, Miss, 43. 

Landscape, see Descriptive Poetry. 

Lang, Andrew, on hexameter verse, 
197 ; translations of Homer and 
Theocritus, 210; and see 89. 

Language, Poe on the power of, 257. 

Lanier, Clifford Anderson (1844- ), 

455- 
l^anier, Sidney, notice of his poetry 

and genius, 449-451 ; early vein, 



449; his theory, 450; symphonic 
compositions, il>. ; Scic7ice of Eng- 
lish Verse, 451 ; and see 54, 455. 

" Laocoon," Lessing's, 449. 

Larcom, Lucy (1826- ), 50, 445. 

Lars, Taylor's narrative poem, 425. 

"Last Leaf, The," Holmes's, 285. 

Lathrop, George Parsons, 442, 463. 

Latinism, Bryant's, 85, 91 ; Lowell's, 

Law, the, and Literature, 279. 

Law, the Reign of, 298. 

Lazarus, Emma (1849- ), transla- 
tions, 447 ; The Dance of Death, ib. ; 
and see 55. 

Learning, affectation of, by Poe, 260 ; 
Holmes on, 294; Lowell's, 331- 

333- 
Legend of Brittany, Lowell's, 311. 

Leighton, William, his Dramas, 454. 

Leland, Charles Godfrey, translations 
of Heine, 55 ; and see 59, 455. 

Length of a Poem, Poe's canon, 249. 

Lessing, 336, 449. 

Letters, Men of, — Lowell our repre- 
sentative of, 304. 

Letters and Social Aims, Emerson's, 
172. 

Lewes, George Henry, 422, 425. 

Lewis, Charlton T., on blank-verse 
and hexameter, 90; on hexameter, 
197. 

"Liberator, The," Garrison's, 103. 

" Liberty," Hay's, 453. 

Life-School ; Whitman, 380 ; need 
and promise of, in poetry, 464-467 ; 
success of, in prose fiction, 464 ; and 
see Dra m aand Dra m a lists. 

"Ligeia," Poe's, 237, 272. 

Light of Asia, AmoXd's, causes of its 
success, 465 ; and see Buddhism. 

Limitations, Bryant's, 66, 69-71 ; Em- 
erson's, 155; over-respect for, 461. 

Lincoln, Lowell's portrait of, 344; 



496 



INDEX. 



Whitman's " Burial Hymn," 364, — 
his lecture and poem on, 391, 392 ; 
and see 335. 

" Lines on a Great Man Fallen," 
Lord's, 123. 

Linton, William James, portrait of 
Whitman, 362 ; and see 360. 

Literary Centres, New England, 37 ; 
New York, 39, 416. 

" Literary Gazette, The," 188. 

Literary Life, Poe's typical of his 
period, 233-236, 238 ; restrictions 
of, 331 ; Taylor's Arcadian days, 
403 ; divided ambition, 409 ; and 
see 281. 

Literary Periods, their sequence, 437 ; 
and see Elizabethan Period, etc., etc. 

Literary Spirit, Longfellow's, 184. 

Literary Verse, Longfellow's excess 
of, 215, — Browning's, ib. 

" Literati," the, characteristics of, 42 ; 
Poe's criticisms examined, 256; and 
see 416. 

Literature, American, Taylor in con- 
nection with recent movement, 396. 

"Living Temple, The," Holmes's, 
286, 292. 

Liszt, effect of society on, 468. 

Locke, 145. 

Lodge, Thomas, 374. 

Long, John Davis (1838- ), 55. 

Longevity, effect of Bryant's, 65, 66, 
72. 

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, cen- 
tre of the Cambridge group, 51 ; 
translation of Dante, 55 ; influenced 
by Bryant, 72; rural verse, 115; 
sense of his loss, 137 ; .L. and Em- 
erson, 177, 178 ; review of his 
works and career, 180-224 ? for- 
tunate in life and death, 180 ; his 
mission apostolic, 180; fresh charm 
of his early work, 181, 182; his 
genius non-creative, but fostering. 



182 ; a poet of Taste and Senti- 
ment, 182, 183; birth, at an au- 
spicious time, 183, 184 ; apprentice- 
ship, 184; "Coplas de Manrique," 
184; prose romances, etc., 185-188; 
Oiitre-Mer, 185; Hyperion, 185, 186, 
328 ; influenced by Richter and 
Heine, 186; Kavanagh, 187; a ro- 
manticist, 187 ; Poetry of Europe, 
188; Poems of Places, 188; poetical 
writings, 188-214; juvenile poems, 
188 ; Voices of the Night, 188, 189 ; 
early translations, 189 ; Ballads and 
Other Poems, and later lyrical col- 
lections, 189-194 ; his sentiment, 
taste, and picturesqueness, 190 ; 
anti-slavery poems, 191 ; imagina- 
tion, 191; "Skeleton in Armor," 
191, 192 ; " occasional poems," 192, 
193 ; metrical expertness, 193 ; " My 
Lost Youth," 194 ; narrative-pieces, 
194; Evajigeline, 195-201; his 
choice, use, and defence, of " Eng- 
lish hexameter" verse, 195-199; 
criticised by Poe, 196 ; Arnold on, 
198 ; remarks to Macrae, 199 ; Hia- 
watha, 201-203 ; successful treat- 
ment of the Indian legends, 202 ; 
Courtship of Miles Standish, 203 ; 
his dramatic works, 204-207 ; The 
Spanish Student, 204 ; Pandora, 
204 ; Christus, 204 ; his dramatic 
shortcomings, and Tennyson's, 204 ; 
The Golden Legend, 205-207 ; Gothic 
sympathies, 205 ; Michael Angelo, 
207 ; a representative volume, The 
Seaside and the Fireside, 207 ; Hang- 
ing of the Crane and Kera7Tios, 207 ; 
Tales of a Wayside Inn, 208, 209 ; 
as a raconteur, compared with Mor- 
ris, ib. ; translation of The Divint 
Comedy, reviewed, 209-213, — 
method employed, 209, — merits and 
defects, 211-213; his masterly 801* 



INDEX. 



49: 



nets, 213; Ullirna ThuU-, 214; his 
habits, mannerism, moralizing, 
bookishness, 214, 215; "Morituri 
Salutamus," 215 ; a poet of the 
study, 216, — yet also our poet of the 
sea, 217; question of his originality, 
217, 218; cosmopolitanism, 218; 
idea of a national literature, 218, 
219; a pioneer of taste, 220; in 
what sense "a poet of the middle 
classes," 220; ethics and domestic- 
ity, 221 ; lack of passion and dra- 
matic insight, 221-223; Fortune's 
favorite, 222 ; a sympathetic voice, 
222 ; a lovable character, 223 ; ar- 
tistic tact, 223 ; final estimate of his 
poetry, 224 ; his death, 224 ; Poe's 
attack on, 257; and see 12, 43, 49, 
70, 90, 96, 97, 106, 108, III, 114, 
136, 152, 213, 277, 350,390,408,409, 
412, 436, 452, 457, 459, 473. 

Longfellow, Samuel (18 19- ), 50. 

Lord, William Wilberforce, 41, 123, 

Loring, Frederic Wadsworth (1849- 
71), 448. 

Love-poetry, Whittier lacking in, 121 ; 
Emerson's, 157; Lowell's, 310. 

Lowell, James Russell, on the " Lit- 
erati " and Griswold's flock, 42, 43 ; 
his landscape, 47 ; satires, 59 ; on 
Emerson, 136; on hexameter, 197; 
review of his works and career, 304- 
348 ; our representative man of let- 
ters and culture, 304 ; Dr. Dowden 
on, 305 ; special standing, 306 ; his 
catholicity, 306 ; parentage and 
breeding, 307 ; at Harvard, 30S, 
309 ; A Year's Life, 309 ; early 
range and tendencies, 310 ; edits 
T/ie Pioneer, 310 ; marriage to Miss 
White, 311; Poems, 311; "Legend 
of Brittany" and " Rhoecus," 311, 
312; progressive views and poetry, 
312, 313; ^^^w-y {1848), etc., 313- 



320 ; metrical style, 314 ; lyricai 
beauty, 315; his theory of song, 31 , 
a poet of nature and the open ai.. 
317; pastoral tastes, 318; "To ti.c 
Dandelion," 319 ; T/w Vision of S;/ 
Laiotfal, 319: estimate of his work 
thus far, 320; The Biglow Papers, 
321-325, — their wit and humor 
321, — originality, 322, — second se- 
ries of, 323, — pathos, 324, — unique- 
ness, 325; "The Courtin'," 323; 
A Fable for Critics, 325 ; his prose 
writings, 326-338 ; Conversations, 
326 ; edits the " Atlantic " and 
"North American," 326; Fireside 
Travels — Aniojig My Books — AJv 
Study Windows, — etc., 327; prose 
style and quality, 327-330, the 
strictures on, 328 ; his greater es- 
says, 330; caprice, 331; reading 
and equipment, 331 ; Lowell and 
Poe, 332 ; theory of translation, 
332; point and wisdom, 332-334; 
critical faculty and essays, 334-338 ; 
literary wealth and freedom, 337, 
338 ; Under the Willows, and later 
poems, 338-346; Lowell, Clough, 
and Arnold, 339, 341 ; " In the Twi- 
light," 339 ; his culture, 341 ; The 
Cathedral, 342 ; his manner, 343 ; 
Commemoration Ode, 343 ; Three 
Me?norial Poems, 344, 345 ; "The 
Nooning," 345 ; his genius and bril- 
liant record, 346-348 ; and see 12, 49, 
51. 92, 97.98. 106, no, 115, 129, 133, 
190, 191, 209, 216, 277, 279, 300, 351, 
360, 364, 380, 427, 439. 
Lowell, Maria White (1821-53), 5c. 

309- 3"- 
Lowell, Robert Traill Spence, 51. 
Lucretius, 198, 370. 
Lunt, George, 41. 
Lyrical Poetry, its makers not affected 

by certain restrictions, 18; fresh 



32 



498 



INDEX. 



ness and variety in America, i8 ; 
Halleck's, 40; Boker's, 57; Stod- 
dard's songs, etc., 58 ; Bryant's, 80, 
83 ; Emerson's genius for, 150 ; lyr- 
ical quality highest in Emerson, 
164, 165; Longfellow's lyrical qual- 
ity, 191, 192; Poe's unique lyrical 
quality, 241-248; beauty of Low- 
ell's, 315, 316, 339; Whitman's 
genius for, 353 ; Winter's, 440 ; Al- 
drich's, ib. 
Lytle, William Haines {1826-63), 453. 

Macaulay, 112. 

Macdonough, Augustus Rodney, 55. 

MacDowell, Katherine Sherwood 
Bonner (1849-83), 455. 

Mackay, Charles, in. 

Macon, John Alfred (1851- ), 455. 

Macrae, David, Longfellow's remarks 
to, 199. 

Magazines, etc., " Southern Literary 
Messenger," 235 ; " American Re- 
view," etc., 236 ; " Graham's," 400 ; 
"Pioneer," 310; "Putnam's 
Monthly," 354, 355, 408; "Atlantic 
Monthly," 91, 293, 326, 409 ; " North 
American Review," 60, 72, 90, 326. 

Manliness, need of, in recent verse, 
472. 

Manner, vs. Style, Lowell's, 342, 343 ; 
his strength of, 314. 

Mannerism, its good side, 71 ; Long- 
fellow's, 214; Poe's, 257; Whit- 
man's, 378 ; no mark of genius, 378. 

Margaret Smith's ycnirnal, Whittier's, 
no. 

Marginalia, Poe's, 255. 

" Maria del Occidente." See Brooks, 
Maria G. 

" Marian Douglas." See Robinson, 
A7inie D. 

Market, the Literary, need of, 22, 23 ; 
growth, 29 ; in Philadelphia and 



New York, 42, 44 ; fickle and shift- 
ing character of, in Poe's time, 234, 
237 ; dangers of too ready sale, 293 ; 
hack-work often harmful to genius, 
294; Whitman's relations to, 361 ; 
Howells's perception of, 462; and 
see 38. 

Martin, Homer, 46. 

Martin, John, 242. 

Marvell, A., 167 ; his Ode, 427. 

Masque of the Gods, The, Taylor's, 430. 

" Masque of the Red Death," Poe's, 
238. 

Massachusetts vs. New York, 355. 

Massey, Gerald, in. 

Masterpieces, their need of adequate 
theme and atmosphere, 19, 20 ; Poe's 
best tales, 254; Lowell's " Biglow 
Papers," 321 ; and see 294. 

Materialism — material energy of 
America, 17; benefits of, 471 ; and 
see 54, 437. 

Mather, Cotton, 34. 

Mather, Increase, 34. 

Mathews, Cornelius, 57. 

Matthews, Brander, on play-writing, 
468. 

Maturin, C. R., 252. 

May, Samuel J., 104. 

"May-Day," Emerson's, 152. 

McDermott, Hugh Farrar (1834- ), 

444- 
McEntee, Jervis, 46. 
McFingal, Trumbull's, 35. 
McKay, Jas. Thomson (1843- )5 443- 
McKnight, George, 443. 
McLean, Sarah Pratt (1855- )' 455- 
McMaster, Guy Plumphrey (1829- ) 

49. 
Mediaevalism, revival of mediaeval 

forms, 195; Longfellow's, 205, 206; 

and see 204. 
Medicine, profession of, and litera* 

ture, 279. 



IXDEX. 



499 



Meditative Poetry, Bryant's, 47, 66, So. 

Melody, Emerson's, 17S; Poe a mas- 
ter of, 243-252, passim ; essential 
to poetry, 249; of negro song, 251. 

Melville, Herman, 49. 

Memnon, Carleton's, 469. 

" Memoranda during the War," Whit- 
man's, 364. 

" Merlin," Emerson's, 165. 

Metaphysics, hostile to inspiration 
and art, 249; Poe's dislike of, 253. 

Metre, Holmes's liking for classical 
English forms, 28S ; measure of 
"Locksley Hall," 313; Whitman's 
lyrical and metrical method, exam- 
ined, 37 1-378, — not original, 37 r, — 
not to be rejected for its strangeness, 
372, — its rejection of common 
forms, 373, — conformed to a theory, 
375, — Whitman's explanation of, 
375, — how suited to his talent and 
purpose, 376, — extreme formalism 
of, 377 ; true genius at ease with any 
and all forms, 377 ; Whitman's 
measures most effective, when least 
eccentric, 378 ; Taylor's retention 
of original metres in translation, 423, 
424 ; Pindaric verse, 427 ; the ele- 
giac distich, 454; and see For?n. 

Michael Angela, Longfellow's, 207. 

Microcosm, The, Coles's, 300. 

Middle classes, relations of Longfel- 
low and Tennyson to, 220. 

Middle States, Poets and Poetry of, 

" Miles O'Reilly," see Halpine. 

Miller, Cincinnatus Hiner (Joaquin), 
pictures of nature, 47 ; poetry of, 452. 

Millet, J. F., 115. 

Milton, his poetic canon, 165, 224; 
and see 70, 100, 167, 327. 

Minor Verse, significant of the gen- 
eral drift, 436 ; profusion of, 460. 

"Mirror. The," 236. 



Miscellanies, lOmerson's, 171. 

"Miscellany, The Boston, " 309. 

Mitchell, Donald G., 401. 

Mitchell, S. \Veir (1830- ), 443. 

Mitchell, Walter (1826- ), 443. 

Mitchill, Samuel Latham (1764-1831) 
a prototype of Holmes, 279, 286. 

"Modern Instance, A," Howells's, 
295. 

Modern yob, The, Peterson's, 443. 

Modern Poets, Emerson on, 179. 

Mogg Megone, Whittier's, iii. 

Moliere, 259, 338, 468. 

Moller, cited by Emerson, 149. 

Monkhouse, Cosmo, on Whitman, -^f^y 

Montaigne, compared with Emerson, 
297; and see 143, 145, 171, 332. 

Moftte Rosa, Nichols's, 443. 

Montgomery, George Edgar, scien- 
tific spirit, 444 ; rhythm, il?. 

Montgomery, James, 39. 

Moore, 40, 239, 286, 287, 290, 399, 407. 

Moralism, Longfellow's habit of mor- 
alizing, 190, 215; the New England 
failing in art, 312 ; and see 408. 

Morality, of American poets, 123; 
necessity of some standard, 270. 

" Morituri Salutamus," Longfellow's, 
215. 

Morris, George Pope, 41. 

Morris, William, compared with 
Longfellow^, 208 ; and see 89, 407. 

" Morte d'Arthur," Tennyson's, 86. 

Moulton, Louise Chandler (1835- ), 
446. 

"MS. Found in a Bottle," Poe's, 233. 

Muhlenberg, William Augustus (1796- 
1877), 50. 

Munby, Arthur J., his " Dorothy,'* 
198, 454. 

Munford, William (1775-1825), 55. 

Murfree, Mary Noailles, 451, 463. 

Music, and Poetry, merits and defect? 
of Lanier's theory, 449, 450. 



500 



INDEX. 



" My Captain," Whitman's, 378, 392. 
"My Lost Youth," Longfellow's, 194. 
Mysticism, Poe's passion for, 253, 255, 

258. 
My Study lVincic"ws,J^owe].Vs, 327. 

Narrative Poetry, Longfellow's 
success in, 194 ; his talent as a ra- 
conteur, his 2 ales, etc., 208, — com- 
pared with Morris's, 208, 209; Tay- 
lor's, 407. 

Narrowness, the main defect of Whit- 
man, 384, 386. 

Nationality, American, 96, 97, — Her- 
bert Spencer on, 219; Longfellow's 
conception of a national literature, 
218, 219 ; formation of the national 
type, 474 ; and see 456. 

National Ode, The, Taylor's Centen- 
nial Poem, 427 ; its measure, etc., 
427. 

National Sentiment, 28, 29 ; patriot- 
ism, 28, 29, 123, — expressed in 
song, 36, — Holmes's, 299; in poe- 
try and literature, 48, 49 ; and emo- 
tion, songs of, 49; nonrecognition 
of, 60. 

National Song, its relations to a na- 
tion's spirit and history, i ; a 
growth, not an artifice, 3 ; original 
flavor required, 12; must reflect the 
national life, 44 ; exemplified by our 
poets, 48, 49 ; and see 36. 

Naturalism. See Realism. 

Naturalness, of American Female 
Poets, 447. 

Nature, Emerson's, 171. 

Nature, poets of, are poets of free- 
dom, 91 ; Whittier's youth with, 
103; Emerson on Nature and the 
UmverSc.1 Soul, 148, 149 ; Whit- 
man's view of, 368 ; her law of Re- 
serve, 368, 369: Taylor's love of, 
399- 



"Nature," sonnet by Longfellow, 213. 

" Nature and the Poets," Burroughs's, 
117. 

Neal, John, 41. 

Negro minstrelsy, songs, ballads, etCj 
251. 

Neo-Platonism, 143. 

Neo-Romanticism, 220, 459; English, 
10. 

Neurotic disorder, effect on genius, 
270. 

New Day, The, Gilder's, 442. 

New England, early regard for letters, 
34; a mother to her poets, 53; 
Whittier the poet of, 97-99, 106; 
popular traits, 98; influence upon 
the country at large, 98, 99 ; traits 
of, 147 ; dislike of the unsavory and 
unclean, 166; village-life in "Kav- 
anagh," 187; every -day life por- 
trayed by Holmes and Howells, 
295 ; our Eastern poets, 299 ; 
Holmes a type of its cleverness, 
302 ; Lowell's rendering of, 305, 
346, — his Yankee characters and 
dialect, 321-325; effect of its train- 
ing, 306; and see 130, 177. 

New England School, 397 ; habit of 
preaching, 215. 

" New England Tragedies, T h e," 
Longfellow's, 204. 

Newton, 155. 

New York, poets and poetry of, 39- 
42 ; indifference, 53 ; as the literary 
market, 237 ; authorship in, 397 ; 
as a literary centre, 416. 

Nichols, Starr Hoyt, 443. 

Nimrod, de Kay's, 442. 

Nomenclature, use of Roman substi- 
tutes for Grecian names, 91. 

" Nooning, The," Lowell's projected 
idyl, 345- 

" North American Review, T h e," 
Whitman's paper in, 60; edited by 



INDEX. 



501 



Lowell and Norton, 326; and see 
72,90. 

North and South, their spirits con- 
trasted, 255. 

JVorth Shore Watch, The, Wood- 
berry's, 461. 

Norton, Andrews, 52. 

Norton, Charles Eliot, 55, 210. 

Norton, John, Elegy on Anne Brad- 
street, 33; and see 277. 

Novels and Novelists, Simms, 38 ; 
pioneers in America, 40; novels, 
Poe's incapacity for writing them, 
252, — review of Holmes's, 294, 
295, — Taylor's, 420, 421, — of our 
female wrhers, 448 ; Holmes and 
Howells, 295; novelist-poets, 461- 
463 ; diversion of ideality to prose 
fiction, 461 - 463 ; Aldrich, 462 ; 
Howells and his career, 462 ; re- 
cent American experts, 463 ; lesson 
to the poets, 464 ; present surplus- 
age, 465. 

Novelty, the revival of old modes, 276. 

Oakes, Urian, Elegy on Shepard, 

ZZ ; and see 34, 277. 
Objective Poetry, 146. 
Obscurity of Style, condemned by Poe, 

168 ; not conducive to lasting fame, 

221. 
O'Brien, Fitz - James (1S28-62), 59, 

404, 444. 
"Occasional " Poetry, Whittier's, 108, 

122, 123; Longfellow's, 192, 193; 

merits and faults of Holmes's, 2S7- 

291. 
O'Connor, William Douglas, " The 

Good Gray Poet," 36c. 
O'Conor, Charles, 74. 
Ode measures, no. 
Ode on the Death of Nat. Bacon, 33. 
Ode to W. H. Channing, Emerson's, 

169. 



Odes, Lowell's, 343-346, 428 ; Tay- 
lor's, 427. 

O'Hara, Theodore (1820-67), 49- 

"Old Ironsides," Holmes's, 2S0. 

Omar, 279; Ruba'- at of, 184. 

" One - hoss Shay, The," Holmes's 
285, 292. 

Oppression, conflict with, 49. 

Optimism, Emerson's, 141. 

Oratory, in the South, 449. 

O'Reilly, John Boyle, 444. 

Orientalism, Emerson's, 167. 

Originality, how manifest in national 
song, 5 ; character of Bryant's, 67 ; 
isolating effect of, 180; the question 
of Longfellow's, 217, 218 ; a distinc- 
tive air and tone, 218; Poe's, 239; 
Emerson's, 297 ; Holmes's, 297 ; 
Lowell's, 347; false, 366; misun- 
derstood at first, 372. 

Osgood, Frances Sargent (181 1-50), 

50- 

Osgood, Kate Putnam (1841- ), 446. 

Ossoli, the Marchioness. See Fuller, 
Sarah Margaret. 

Otis, Calvin N., quoted, 19. 

Outlook, the, survey of the poetic 
field, with surmises as to the future, 
435-476; alleged decadence, 436; 
recent conditions, 437, 438 ; poets 
of the middle and younger schools, 
439-441 ; female poets, 444-448 ; 
the South, 449-451 ; the Pacific 
slope, 451, 452 ; the Inland States, 
452-454; translations, dialect-verse, 
etc., 454, 455 ; traits of the general 
choir, as compared with those or 
minor British poets, 456; relative 
importance of our elder and younger 
schools, 456-458 ; over-refinement, 
459 ; passing vogues, 460 ; profuse 
minor verse, 460 ; half-efforts, 461 ; 
an intercalary period, 461 ; diver- 
sion of ideality to prose fiction, etc., 



502 



INDEX. 



461-464 ; a Life-School needed, 464 ; 
attitude and demands of the public, 
465 ; promise of a dramatic move- 
ment, 466 ; the stage, 467 ; poet and 
playwright, 468 ; present favoring 
conditions, 470-472; present re- 
quirements, 472 ; our novitiate 
ended, 473; points of vantage, 474, 
475 ; conjecture of the future, 476. 

" Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rock- 
ing," Whitman's, 353. 

Outre-Mer, Longfellow's early legend, 
51, 181 ; reviewed, 185. 

Over-refinement, Whitman's verse a 
reaction from, 385. 

Over-work, Taylor's, 418 ; question of 
American, 418. 

" Owen Innsley." See Jennison, L. JV. 

Pacific Coast, poets of, 451, 452. 
Page, William, his portrait of Lowell, 

312. 
Page, Thomas Nelson, 451. 
Paine, Robert Treat, Jr. (1773-1811), 

35- 
Painting, American, contrasted with 

poetry, 4 ; its new-world beginning, 
14; first distinctive school that of 
landscape, 46, — analogy between 
their work and Bryant's, 47 ; land- 
scape, 68, 466. 

Palmer, John Williamson (1825- ), 
49. 

Palmer, Ray (1808- ), 50. 

Pandora, Longfellow's, 204. 

Pantheism, modern, 262. 

Parker, Theodore, 130. 

Parkman, Francis, on Whittier, 97. 

Parnassus, Emerson's, 166, 175, 248. 

Parsons, Thomas William, an exqui- 
site lyrical poet,55; his translations 
of Dante, 55, 210; " Lines on a Bust 
of Dante," 55 ; a poet for poets, ib.; 
and see 51, 54, 360. 



Passion, wanting in Bryant, 70; 
Whittier's, 121 ; rare in Emerson, 
1 56, 1 57 ; its extremes avoided by 
Longfellow, 221-223. 

" Past, The," Bryant's, 82. 

Pastoral Verse, Whittier on, 116. 

Pater, Walter, 401. 

Paulding, James Kirke, 40. 

" Paul Hermes." See Thayer, W. R, 

Payne, John Howard, 40, 466. 

Peabody, William Bourne Oliver 
(1799-1847), 50. 

Peck, Samuel Minturn (1854- ), 448. 

Pedantry, colonial, 15, 35. 

Pembroke, Earl of, 155. 

Pendragon, Young's, 454. 

Pennsylvanian Idyls, Taylor's, 412. 

Pentameter Verse, rhymed, Bryant's, 
72 ; and see English Heroic Verse. 

Percival, James Gates, 38, 47, 188. 

Period, our own, its intercalary na- 
ture, 461 ; summary of present fa- 
voring conditions, 470-472 ; present 
requirements, 472-474. 

Perry, Nora (18- ), 446. 

Personality, marked, of Am. Poets, 
128; Emerson's, 140, 141; Poe's, 
as revealed by tradition and por- 
traiture, 227-229; effective charm 
of Holmes's, 300, 301 ; Lowell's, 
306; essential to produce good 
work, 306; Whitman's picturesque 
bearing, 352, 357, 359, 390, 391; 
Taylor's, 410. 

Peterson, Frederick (1859- ), 454. 

Peterson, Henry, 443. 

Petofi, 105. 

Phelps, Charles Henry, 452. 

Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart (1844- ), 
446. 

Phi Beta Kappa Society, 283. 

Philanthropy, Whittier's, 129, 130. 

Philistinism, metropolitan, 53, 54 
Bryant's relations to, 65. 



INDEX. 



503 



Philosophy, the ideal, 133; method oi, 
opposed to that of poetry, 133; 
Emerson's, 140, 143, 144; union 
with poetry, 141 ; Emerson's, exam- 
ined, 141-147 ; of the ancients, 142- 
144; Plato, 143; Plotinus, 144; 
transfigured in Emerson's poetry, 
1 48- 1 50. 

Piatt, John James, his landscape, 47 ; 
prairie and homestead idyls of, 453 ; 
and see 440, 462. 

Piatt, Sarah Morgan Bryan (1S36- ), 
446. 

Picttire of St. Johny The, Taylor's, 425. 

Picturesqueness, Longfellow's, 190. 

Pierpont, John, 37, 2S0. 

Pike, Albert, 38, 41. 

Pindar, 353, 423. 

Pindaric Verse, 427. 

Pinkney, Edward Coate, 37. 

" Pioneer, The," edited by Lowell and 
Carter, 310. 

Placidity, not a characteristic of the 
greatest art, 221. 

Plagiarism, question of Longfellow's, 
189. 

Plantation or Negro verse, 455. 

Plato, Emerson on, 137, 142, 155. 

Plays and Playwrights. See Drama 
and Dramatists. 

Plotinus, likeness of Emerson to, 144. 

Plutarch, 143. 

Poe, Edgar Allan, on the sentimen- 
talists, 43 ; on transcendental poe- 
try, 168, 169; criticism of Longfel- 
low, 189, — of his " Evangeline," 
196; review of his life and works, 
225-272; distinctive reputation, 
225 ; ideals of him formed by Time, 
225 ; opposite views of his charac- 
ter, 226; a unique writer, 227; per- 
sonal aspect, 227 ; Halpin's engrav- 
ing of, 228 ; later portraits, 22S ; 
Briggs's pen-portrait of, 229 ; a com- 



plex nature, 229; story of his life 
and career, 230-237; parentage, 
birth, and education, 230, 231 ; ser- 
vice in the U. S. Army, 231 ; at 
West Point, 232 ; rupture with his 
protector, Mr. Allan, 232 ; prize- 
story of "A MS. Found in a Bot- 
tle," 233 ; perverse temperament, 
234; precarious literary life, 234- 
236; marriage, 235; on "The 
Southern Literary Messenger," 235 ; 
work, errors, and misfortunes, 235, 
236; death, 236; dependence on 
the literary market, 237 ; exclusively 
a man of letters, 23S ; Tales of the 
Grotesque and Arabesque, 238; re- 
view of his poetry, 239-248 ; early 
books of verse, 239; precocity, 240; 
The Raven a?id Other Poe?ns, 241- 
248 ; " The Raven,'' 241, 242 ; " City 
in the Sea," "The Sleeper," "The 
Bells," etc., 242-246; " Ulalume," 
246; "The Haunted Palace" and 
" Israfel," 247, 248 ; limited range, 
248, 250; his theory of Poetry, 249, 
250; use of refrain and repetend, 
250; sound and rhythm, 251; his 
Tales, 252-254 ; revolt against the 
connnonplace, 252 ; qualities as a 
romancer, 253; his prose master- 
pieces, 254; compared with Haw- 
thorne, 254; Marginalia, 2 K^^; The 
Literati, 256; prose style and equip- 
ment, 257-264; " Fall of the House 
of Usher," 258; fantasy and gro- 
tesqueness, 258, 259; lack of true 
humor, ib. ; affectation of learning, 
260 ; his materials, 261 ; Eureka, 
262; absolute love of beauty, 263; 
protest against didacticism, 263 ; 
Griswold's memoir of, 265 ; moral 
and physical traits, 266-272 ; chas- 
tity of his writings, 266 ; not a scof- 
fer nor an habitual druiikard, but 



504 



INDEX. 



with an inherited taint, 267 ; sensi- 
tiveness, 268; unmorality, 269; 
question of neurotic disorder, 270; 
fatal lack of will, 271 ; on Lowell, 
311 ; his analysis of "The Raven," 
324; on Taylor, 402; and see 12, 
38, 41, 54, 56, 65, 129, 164, 325, 332, 
350> 374, 411, 416, 433, 449, 451- 

Poems of Barnaval, de Kay's, 442. 

Poems of Places^ Longfellow's, 188. 

Poems of the Orient, Taylor's, re- 
viewed, 406-408, 457. 

Poet, special distinction awarded him, 
63 ; the supreme and typical, 177, 
178; Emerson's conception of, 179; 
tests of his genius, 470. 

Poetae Emeriti, 439. 

Poet and his Master, The, Gilder's, 442. 

Poet at the Breakfast - Table, The, 
Holmes's, 294. 

Poet Militant, Whittier, 124. 

Poetic Life, Poe as an exemplar, 264- 
272 ; question of success, 396; Tay- 
lor's Arcadian Days, 403, — ro- 
mance of his youth, 405 ; lesson of 
Taylor's, 413-419; his varied expe- 
riences, 414; his own theory of, 
415; question of choice and envi- 
ronment, 415, 416; in New York, 
416; influence of journalism on, 
417 ; distracting forces, 418, 419. 

" Poetic Principle, The," Poe's essay 
on, 249. 

Poetry : A Metj'ical Essay, Holmes's, 
283. 

Poetry, chief of the arts, i ; study of 
its aim and province, 2 ; American 
school of, 4-1 1 et seq. ; Scottish, 21, 
22 ; relations to criticism, 25; delay 
of its rise in America, 26, — rea- 
son, 27 ; final beginning of, 28-30 ; 
relative order, epic, dramatic, reflec- 
tive, descriptive, etc., 46; impor- 
tance of tone in, 68, 69 ; simplicity 



of the best, 78, 170; judged /^r se, 
105; duty of the poet as an artist, 
107; faith essential to, 128; poetry 
of hum.anity vs. that of the ideal, 
129 ; method of, compared with that 
of philosophy, 133, 134; technique, 
135; poetry of thought, 135, 136; 
the language of intellectual nobil- 
ity, 136, 148; subjective and objec- 
tive, 146; its credentials, 148; her- 
esy of the didactic, 1 50 ; its pro- 
phetic vision of scientific laws, 1 53- 
155; not mere artisanship, 158; 
crystalline expression, 161 -163; 
rhythmical compression, 163; Mil- 
ton's canon of, 165, 224; Emerson's 
view in " Merlin," 165 ; law of good 
taste, 166; transcendental method 
in, 168, 169; "that which shapes 
and elevates," 177; as a liberal art, 
177; impetus to, from Longfellow, 
— poetry of taste and the affections, 
190; excessive literary flavor, 215; 
poetry of " passion and of pain," 221 ; 
sympathetic, 222 ; haunting quality, 
227 ; a passion, not a purpose with 
Poe, 239, — his theory of, in " The 
Poetic Principle," 249 ; relations of, 
to neurotic disorder, 270 ; effect of 
Fashion on, 273, 274; revivals and 
survivals of old styles, 275, 276; 
collegiate verse, 277 ; the fruit of 
passion and experience, 279, 307 ; 
knee-buckle and society-verse, 281 ; 
"occasional," 281-291, passim; 
songs, 282 ; for the wise and witless, 
289 ; Holmes as a reciter of, 301 ; 
antique and modern purposes con- 
trasted, 311,312; progressive poe- 
try, 313 ; Lowell, on construction 
of, 315, — his theory of, 316, — his 
poetry of Nature, 317-319; serio- 
comic verse, 321, 322 ; eclogues, 
321; Lowell's satirical, 321-326, —• 



INDEX. 



505 



his technical distinction of, from 
prose, 327, 32S, — his odes, 343- 
345; must imitate the decency of 
Nature, 367-370; Goethe on its dis- 
tinction from prose, 373 ; of the fu- 
ture, 375; of nature, 379, 3S0; the 
genre., 3S0 ; imagination, its chief 
requisite, 381 ; relations to science, 
382; formalism, 3S6; Lanier's 
theory of verse, 450; dangers of 
theorizing, 450; its enduring qual- 
ity, 463 ; must possess human and 
dramatic interest, 464-466; prose- 
romance not a lasting substitute, 
465; not alone a criticism of life, 
466; the poet's faculty compulsive, 
470; conditions now favoring, 471- 
473; effect of criticism, 471; not 
only an art, but an inspiration, 472 ; 
our English tongue as its medium, 
475; its canons unalterable, 476; 
the future of American song, 476; 
and see Bucolic Vey'se, Descriptive 
Poetry, Drama, Idyllic Verse, Love- 
Poetry., N'arrative Poetry, Pastoral 
Verse, Kefortn - Verse, Religious 
Verse y Satire, Scntit/iental Verse, 
Sonnets, etc. 
poets, American, their aids and hin- 
drances, 4, II; early restrictions, 
— novelty of the situation, 13, — col- 
onialism, 14, — conflict with Nature, 
15, — pedantry of colonial verse- 
makers, 15, — immature Republican- 
ism, 16, 17, — materialism, 17, — 
technical difficulties, 18, — lack of 
home-themes, 19, 20, — disenchant- 
ments, 21, — want of background, 21, 
22, — inadequate support, 23, — de- 
fective copyright, 23-25 ; landscape 
of, 28 ; national feeling, 29 ; love of 
freedom of, 29 ; means of support, 
29; conviction, 29; reverence, 29; 
leading names from the settlement 



to the Civil War, 31-61 ; colonial, 
33-35; Revolutionary, 35; post-Rev- 
olutionary, 36; earliest group of real 
promise, 37 ; sectional traits, 37 ; 
eastern, 37-39; southern, 3S; in New 
York, etc., 39-43* 53> 54; conces- 
sions to the pioneers, 39; multiplica- 
tion of versifiers in Poe's time, 42 ; 
sentimentality, male and female, 43 ; 
survival of the fittest, 44 ; descrip- 
tive, 46, 47 ; true to the national sen- 
timent, 48, 49; religious, 50; female, 
50; university, 51; transcendental, 
51, 52, 146, 147 ; composite and ar- 
tistic, 52-58 ; as playwrights, 57 ; as 
satirists, etc., 59; poets of freedom 
and patriotism, 91 ; question of " the 
best " among them, 95, — the " most 
national," 96; purity of, 123, 124; 
distinct tis personages, 129; Whit- 
man's strictures on, 389 ; recent and 
younger, in the East, West, and 
South, enumeration, 440-455; a 
Scotchman on " American poet- 
esses," 444, — their muster-roll and 
traits, 444-448 ; compared with llrit- 
ish contemporaries, 456 ; recent and 
younger, halting purpose and ideal- 
ity of, 458 ; decorative feeling, 459 ; 
their present opportunity and re- 
quirements, 471-475; and see In- 
troduction. 

" Poets and Poetry of America," and 
Griswold's other works, 265. 

" Poets and Poetry of Europe," Long- 
fellow's, 188. 

Poet's yoiirnal. The, Taylor's, 405, 
419. 

Pope, 65, 67, 72, 76, 89, 275, 288, 303, 
308. 336. 

Popularity, Longfellow's, 222 ; of 
Whitman and of \Vhittier compared, 
385 ; and see Fame. 

Porter, Noah, 176. 



5o6 



INDEX. 



Poverty, bearing on authorship, 267, 

268. 
Powers, Horatio Nelson (1826- ), 

443- 
Practice- Work, Poe's, 24T. 

" Prairies, The," Bryant's, 81. 

Precocity, Bryant's, 72 ; Poe's, 240 ; 

of Bryant, Keats and Shelley, 402. 
Preston, Harriet Waters, (18- ), 

translations from the Proven9al, 

etc., 55, 454- 
Preston, Margaret Junkin (183- ), 

447. 
Prince Dettkalion, Taylor's swan-song, 

431 ; rhythmical beauty, ib.; theme 

and sentiment of, 431, 432. 
" Princess, The," Tennyson's, 89. 
Pro arts etfocis, 48, 130. 
"Problem, The," Emerson's, 152. 
Proctor, Edna Dean, (18- ), 446. 
Professor at the Breakfast - Table, 

Holmes's, 294. 
Propagandism, of Whitman and his 

disciples, 360, 386. 
Prophet^ The, Taylor's, 428 - 430 ; 

modes of treating such a theme, 
429. 

Prophet Bard, the, 131. 

Proportion, the sense of, deficient in 
Emerson, 159; sense of, in Poe, 
257 ; and see 336. 

Prose, Bryant's, 93; Whittier's, no; 
Emerson's, 134, 136, 171 -176, — 
its strength and importance, 171 ; 
Bacon's, 171 ; Carlyle's, 171 ; Lan- 
dor's, 172 ; purity of Emerson's 
style, 173, — poetic quality of same, 
173, 174; "prose poems," 174; 
Longfellow's, 185; Poe's compared 
with Hawthorne's, 257 ; Holmes's 
works in, 291 ; of poets, compared 
with their verse, 327, 328, 363 ; 
Lowell's, 326-338, — individuality 
of, 327, 328, — the strictures upon. 



328, — style, 330, — conceits of, 330, 
-— point and wisdom, 332-334, — < 
lack of proportion, 336, — wealth 
and freedom, 337 ; defects of Whit- 
man's, 363 ; Whitman on, as substi- 
tute for verse, y]^ ; Goethe on " po- 
etic prose," y]2i ; Taylor's, 401, 421 ; 
and see 31. 

Proudfit, David Law (1842- ), 443. 

Provincialism, the charm of Boston, 
284; of Concord and of "Manna- 
hatta " compared, 356. 

Pseudo-classicism, 456. 

Pseudo-naturalism, of Whitman's sex- 
ual poems, 370. 

Public, changes in its taste, 438 ; our 
poets and the, 465 ; and the play- 
wright, 468. 

Public Men, American jurists, states- 
men, etc., 305 ; in the Biglow Pa- 
pers, 323. 

Puritanism, and the Quakers, 99, loi ; 
Whittier on, 125; cleanliness next 
to godliness, 166 ; opposed to beauty 
and sentiment, 181 ; Longfellow's 
treatment of, 205 ; Poe's misunder- 
standing of, 253 ; Holmes's conflict 
with, 277, 295 ; and see 446. 

Purity, Whittier's, 129. 

" Putnam's Monthly," on Whitman, 
354, 355- 

Quakerism, Whittier's, loi, — his 
Quaker ballads, 113; and see 99, 
125, 126, 385, 398, 430. 

"Quaker Poet, The," 113. See Whit- 
tier. 

" Quaker Widow, The," Taylor's, 412. 

Quality, vs. copiousness, 114; marked 
in Lowell's verse, 316, 317. 

Quantity, antique and modern, 197, 
198. 

Queen Anne's Period, its style ifl 
vogue, 275 ; verse of, 289. 



IXDEX. 



507 



Rabelais, 370. 

Radicalism, 313. 

" Rain-Dream, A," 82. 

Randall, James Ryder, 49, 451. 

Randolph, Anson Davis Fitz 

(1S20- ), 50. 
"Randolph of Roanoke," Whitticr's, 

109, 122. 
Range, narrowness of Poe's, 239, 248, 

251 ; Lowell's, 340. 
" Rape of the Lock, The," 289. 
Raphael, 25S. 
Ratiocination, Poe's experiments in, 

253- 
"Raven, The," Poe's, criticised, 241, 

242; Poe's analysis of, 246, 250; 

and see 237, 245, 324. 

Raven and Other Poertis, The, Poe's, 
241-248, 457. 

Read, Thomas Buchanan, 54, 56 ; his 
portrait of Taylor, 402. 

Reading, Lowell's wide, 331. 

Realism, Poe's, 253 ; of Holmes's and 
Howells's novels, 295; Whitman's 
poems of sex, 358, — theory of Na- 
ture and art, 367, — his poems on 
the body and its functions, 366-370, 
— as an advertisement, 366, — too 
anatomical, 366, — his defence and 
theory of, 367, 368, — to be tested 
by his own rules, 367, — his mis- 
conception of Nature's method, 368, 
369, — and see 383; ancient views 
on, 369; in poetic drama, must not 
be applied to a commonplace theme, 
429; not the supreme end of art, 
430 ; of modern drama, 467 ; and 
see 322. 

Recitation, poems for, 280, 283 ; 
Holmes's gift for, 301. 

Reform-Verse, want of artistic con- 
scientiousness in, 109, Whittier's, 
129; Longfellow's superficial, 191; 
Lowell's, 310, 312, 313.. 



Refrain, use of, by Poe and Mrs. 
Browning, 245 ; and see 250. 

Rcisebilder, Heine's, 18S. 

Religion of Humanity, 358. 

Religious Verse, and its composers, 
50; Whittier's, 123-128. 

Renaissance, Whitman's method, 371 ; 
revival of old modes, 274. 

Repetend, use of, by Poe and Mrs. 
Browning, 250. 

Repose, marked in Bryant, 80. 

Representative Men, Emerson's, 171. 

Republicanism, on trial with respect 
to art and letters, 10, 11, 306; its 
early stages opposed to ideality, 16- 
18; first-fruits of, 36 ; Bryant's char- 
acter a type of, 64 ; its theory of 
Culture, 305. 

Reserv^e, law of, in Nature and Art, 

369- _ 

Restraint, 441. 

Restrictions, of recent period summa- 
rized, 457. 

Revival, poetic, promise of early, 464; 
symptoms and methods of, 464- 

475- 
Revolutionary Period, poetic sterility 

of, 16; its poets, Trumbull, Frcneau, 

etc., 35, ^(i. 

Rhapsodists, Emerson, 136 ; Whit- 
man, 392. 

Rhetoric, Holmes's lyrical, 280 ; elo- 
quence of Taylor's verse, 411. 

"Rhoecus," Lowell's, contrasted with 
Landor's "Hamadryad," 311, 312. 

Rhyme, how far an artifice, y]^ ; 
Goethe on, ib. ; Milton on, 374. 

Rhymed Addresses, Holmes's, 2S3. 

Rhy77ies of Travel, Taylor's, 402. 

Rhythm, movement or rhythmus of 
Homer's verse, 88, 89; of blank- 
verse, 88-90, 374; of Emerson's 
prose, 173, 174; of hexameter. 198; 
feminine endings, Longfellow's use 



5o8 



INDEX. 



of, 212; Poe's effects of sound, 243, 
245, 247, 249 ; of Holmes, 280 ; of 
Whitman's verse, 371 ; its relations 
to expression, y]-^^ ; Whitman in 
pursuit of the harmonies of Nature, 
375; sonorousness of Taylor's, 400, 
— beauty of, in Prince Deukalion, 
431 ; Lanier's harmony and sym- 
phony in verse, 450. 

Richter, (Jean Paul), influence on 
Longfellow, 186. 

Riley, James Whitcomb, 455. 

Riordan, Roger (1847- ), 443. 

Robinson, Annie Douglas (" Marian 
Douglas") (1842- ), 446. 

Rollins, Alice Wellington (1847- )> 
446. 

Romanticism, Longfellow's, 185, 187 ; 
Poe's characteristic trait, 252, — 
materials of, at his command, 261 ; 
and see Neo-Romanticism. 

Ropes, Arthur Reed, 448. 

Rossetti, Christina G., 446. 

Rossetti, D. G., and Emerson, 158. 

Rossetti, W. M., his translation of 
Dante's Inferno, 210; edits English 
Ed. of Whitman, 370 ; and see 360. 

Rugby, village of, 10. 

Russell, Irwin, 455. 

Ryan, Abram J. (1840- ), 444, 

Saadi, 157, 167. 

Saltus, Francis Saltus (1849- )> 443- 
Salut au Monde, Whitman's, 349. 
Sanborn, Franklin Benjamin, 52, 360 ; 

on Emerson, 136; on Lowell, 309, 

325 ; on the " Biglow Papers," 325. 
Sands, Robert Charles (1799-1832), 75. 
Sandys, George, 33. 
Sangster, Margaret Elizabeth 

(1838- ),446. 
Sargent, Epes, 57. 
Satire, satirical verse, 59; Poe's, 256, 

• — his irony, etc., 259; Holmes's 



prose, 295, — his metrical, compared 
with that of other satirists, 303 ; its 
grade in art, 321, 322 ; and see Big' 
low Papers, Fable for Critics, etc. 

Savage, John (1828- ), 444, 

Savage, Minot Judson (1841- ), 50. 

Saxe, John Godfrey, 59. 

Saxon diction, 212. 

Saxon race, traits of, 124. 

" Scarlet Letter, The," Hawthorne's, 6. 

Schiller, 198, 422. 

School-books, pieces found in, 280, 310= 

Schoolcraft, H. R., Indian legendary, 
202. 

Science, effect of the new learning on 
the poets, 27 ; Bryant's want of sci- 
entific vision, 69; Emerson's pre- 
vision of its discoveries, 153-155; 
poetic illumination of, 154; con- 
trasted with Art, 155; Poe's "Eu- 
reka," 262 ; scientific prescience of 
poets, 262 ; Holmes's poetry of, 
286, — as a savant, 275; relations 
to poetry, 444, — in Whitman's 
verse, 382 ; and see 370, 437, 471. 

Science of JEngiish Verse, The, La- 
nier's, 451. 

Scollard, Clinton (i860- ), 448. 

Scotland, abounding in distinctire 
quality, 22. 

Scott, 40, 70, III, 289, 399, 423. 

Scudder, Horace E., 405. 

Sea, the, Longfellow's poetry of, 217. 

Searing, Laura Redden (" Howard 
Glyndon") (1842- ), 446. 

Sears, Edmund Hamilton (1810-76), 

50- 

Seaside and the Fireside, The, Long- 
fellow's, 207, 457. 

Seclusion, effects of solitude on the 
poet, 155; Poe without comrades, 
264; beneficial effect in the cases 
of Whittier and Burns, 414. 

Sectionalism, local types, 474. 



IXDEX. 



509 



Sedgwick, Catharine Maria, 40. 

Self-assertion, Whitman's, 389. 

Sensuousness, 224. 

Sententiousness, poetic, Emerson's, 
160-163; Lowell's, 314. 

Sentiment, Longfellow the poet of, 
I So, 182, 190 ; Lowell's, 190 ; 
Holmes's, 2S7. 

Sentimental Verse, in England and 
America, 43. 

Sevigne, Madame de, a saying of, 13S. 

Sewall, Harriet Winslow (1819- ), 
50. 

Shakespeare, English quality of, 12; 
play of " The Tempest," 34 ; Emer- 
son on, 179; Osric and Hamlet, 
313; and see 133, 146, 175, 259, y^^, 

335. 351' 374, 3S6, 468. 
Shaw, John (1778-1809), 36. 
Shelley, quoted, 174; influence on 

Lowell, 310, — on Taylor, 405, 408 ; 

as a translator, 424 ; and see 70, 76, 

164, 239, 245, 267, 286, 287, 308, 385, 

402,403, 411. 
Sherman, Frank Dempster (i860- ), 

44S. 
" Sher\vood Bonner." See MacDow- 

ell, Katherine S. B. 
Shinn, Milicent Washburn {18- ), 

446. 
Shurtleff, William Steele (1830- ), 

443- 
Sidney, Sir Philip, 453. 
Sigourney, Lydia Howard Huntley, 

43- 

Sill, Edward Rowland (1843- )> 443- 

Simms, William Gilmore, 38, 41. 

Simph'city, Bryant's, 77 ; Emerson's 
demand for, 170 ; Longfellow's, 198 ; 
of Poe's forms, 251 ; true and false, 
389; and see 224, 459. 

Sincerity, 108 ; Bryant's, 76. 

"Skeleton in Armor, The," Longfel- 
low's, 191, 192. 

Sketch-work, current half-efforts, 460. 



"Skipper Ireson's Ride," ^VhittiL•r's, 
109, 1 14. 

" Sleeper, The," Poe's, 243. 

Smith, Elizabeth Oakcs (1806- ), 5a 

Smith, Capt. John, 34. 

Smith, ^Lay Louise Riley (1842- ), 
446. 

Smybcrt, John, 277. 

Snider, Denton Jacques, 198, 454. 

Siiow-B ozijid, Whittier's, 106; re- 
viewed, 1 1 7-1 20; and see 126, 457. 

Society ajid Solitude, Emerson's, 172. 

Society-Verse, earlier examples, 59 ; 
Holmes's, 284-286; recent increase, 
284; relative status, 285; Aldrich's, 
440 ; poets of the latest vogue, 448 ; 
and see 287, also F7-ench Forms. 

Song and Sto)'y, Fawcett's, 441. 

"Song of Nature," Emerson's, 155. 

" Song of the Camp," Taylor's, 412. 

Songs and Lyrics, Miss Hutchinson's, 
447- 

Songs and Song-Writers, 49, 443 ; 
Holmes, 282. 

Songs, National, Fletcher of Sal- 
toun's saying, 35. 

Songs of Fair Weather, Thompson's, 

443- 

Songs of Labor, WHiittier's, in. 

Songs of Sinnmer, Stoddard's, 457. 

Sojigs of the Sierras, Miller's, 452. 

Sonnets, W'hittier's, in ; perfection 
of Longfellow's, 213; and sonnet- 
eering, 444, 460. 

Sons of Godiuin, The, Leighton's, 454. 

Sophists, the, 143. 

South, the, early neglect of literature, 
34 ; poets and poetry of, 37 ; eigh- 
teenth century taste, 37, 38 ; scanty 
production, 38 ; female poets of, 
447 ; traits of, 449 ; Timrod, La- 
nier, and other poets, 449-451 ; re- 
cent promise of, 451. 

" Southern Literary Messenger, The," 

235- 



5IO 



INDEX. 



Southey, 43, 407. 

Spanish Student, The, Longfellow's, 

204. 
Spenser, 76, 331, 335; Lowell on, 

332, 333- 

"Sphinx, The," Emerson's, 153, 168. 

Spirituality, of Poe's verse, 267 ; es- 
sential to a perfect naturalism, 370. 

Spofford, Harriet Elizabeth Prescott 
(1835- ), 445. 

Spontaneity, Lowell's theory of song, 
316, — his outdoor verse, 317 ; Low- 
ell's, 337 ; of our female poets, 445 ; 
and see 108, 242, 375. 

Sprague, Charles, 37, 99, 283. 

*' Star-Spangled Banner, The," 36. 

Sterne, 294. 

Stockton, Frank R., 463. 

Stoddard, Charles Warren, 452. 

Stoddard, Elizabeth Drew Barstow 
(1823- ), 50, 445, 463. 

Stoddard, Richard Henry, artistic 
range, 57 ; traits, 58 ; fine imagina- 
tion, 58; blank-verse, 58; odes, 58; 
The King's Bell, 58 ; on hexameter, 
197; friendship with Taylor, 403; 
and see 54, no, 408, 439. 

St. Olafs Kirk, Houghton's, 443. 

Stoic Philosophy, 142. 

Storrs, Richard S., quoted, 472. 

Story, William Wetmore, 51, 54, 55, 
56. 

Sto7y of Kennett, Taylor's, 421. 

Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 49. 

Strachey, William, 34. 

Street, Alfred Billings, 47. 

Strodtmann, Adolf, 423. 

" Stuart Sterne." See Bloede, Ger- 
trude. 

Style, Bryant's pure and simple, 71, 
77 ; Whittier's metrical, 1 10 ; artless- 
ness of Emerson's, 152 ; Emerson's 
metrical, 1 58-171, — native and un- 
studied, 1 59, — deficient in structure, 



159, — unconventional, 159, 160, — > 
mode of composition, 160, — lack 
of synthesis, 160, — rich in notable 
passages, 160-163, — his rhythm 
and compression, 163, — lyrical 
quality, 164, 165, — mode of ex- 
pression, ib., — influence of certain 
models on, 166, 167, — escape from 
early faults of, 167-169, — its chief 
canon, 170; obscurity, 168, 221 ; sec- 
ondary to thought, 172; self-forma- 
tive, ib. ; apothegmatic bent of 
Emerson's, 172, 173; Longfellow's 
free-hand measures, 207 ; faults and 
merits of Poe's, 257, — his use of 
the dash and italics, 257 ; Holmes's, 
of i8th Century, 288 ; Lowell's 
prose, 330, 331 ; Whitman's prolix- 
ity, 374, — effects of his method, 
376 ; is the man, 378 ; Whitman's 
fine diction, titles and epithets, 
378; Taylor's poetic, 411. 

Subjectivity, Poe's, 270, 271; Whit- 
man's, 352 ; and see 146. 

Success, worldly, prestige of in Bry- 
ant's case, 64. 

Supernat7iralis7n of New Engla7td, 
Whittier's, 103, 114. 

Superstition and Servility, conflict 
with, Emerson's, 136. 

" Susan Coolidge." See Woolsey, S.C. 

Swedenborg, 143, 179. 

Swinburne, on Whitman, 386; and see 

77, 91. 250, 334, 360, 374, 3^^, 385- 

Swift, 342, 

Swinton, John, 360. 

Swinton, William, 360. 

Symonds, John Addington, 360. 

Sympathetic Quality, notable in Long- 
fellow, 222. 

Symphonic quality, see Rhythm. 

Tact, Longfellow's artistic, 223' 
Whitman's, 350. 



INDEX. 



5^1 



Taine, II. A., theory of environment, 
etc., 3-12; on England, 48. 

Talent, and Genius, 187. 

Tales of a Wayside Inn, Longfellow's, 
114, 203, 20S, 209. 

Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, 
Poe's, 238. 

Talfourd, 468. 

Tasso, 334. 

Taste, its bearing on the chasteness 
of art, 166; Longfellow the apostle 
of, 181-1S3, 190, 191 ; Longfellow 
our pioneer of, 220 ; Poe on poetry 
as the child of, 249; Lowell's, 315; 
vs. Duty, 315; inborn with Amer- 
icans, 474. 

Taylor, Bayard, his landscape, 47 ; 
" Faust," 55, 90, 209 ; pastorals, 19S ; 
review of his career and writings, 
396-434; type of the modern and 
New York author, 396, 397 ; versa- 
tility, 398 ; birth and early life, 398, 
399; his first book, Ximena, 399; 
sonorous quality, 400 ; Travels, 
400, 401 ; on "The Tribune," 402 ; 
Rhymes of Travel, 402 ; Poe on, ib. ; 
portrait by Read, ib. ; Arcadian 
life, 403 ; Californian ballads, 403; 
with Stoddard, Boker, etc., 403, 404 ; 
A Book of Romances, 404 ; " Hylas," 
ib. ; influence of Shelley on, 405; 
his first wife, Mary Agnew, 405 ; 
" Life and Letters " of, 405 ; Poems 
of the Orient, 406-40S ; oriental 
traits, 406; fine narrative pieces, 
songs, etc., 407, 408 ; Poeins of Home 
and Travel, 408 ; "Putnam's 
Monthl}^" ib. ; divided ambition, 
409 ; capabilities, 410 ; personal 
traits, ib. ; poetic style, 411 ; Penn- 
sylvanian idyls, etc., 412 ; effect of 
his career on his lyrical product, 
413-415; theory of life and art, 415; 
environment, 416-419 ; a journalist. 



etc., in New York, 417; lecturing 
and overwork, 418 ; marriage to 
Marie Hansen, 419; The Poet's 
Jour/ial, 419 ; his Noi'els, 421 ; as a 
critic, ib. ; German " Studies," 422 ; 
translation of Faust, 422-425; /Vt- 
ture of St. John and Lars, 425 ; 
Ho77ie Pastorals, 426 ; Goethe and 
Shakespeare Odes, 427 ; The Na- 
tional Ode, ib. ; his dramatic works, 
42S-432 ; The Prophet, 428 ; Masque 
of the Gods, 430 ; a poet of noble 
ideals, ib. ; Prince Deukalion, 431, 
432 ; death, 433 ; thoughts on his 
career, 433, 434 ; and see 49, 54, 56, 
no, 113, 250, 256, 439, 449, 452. 

Taylor, Mrs. Marie Hansen, 405, 419. 

Technique, devotion of modern Eng- 
lish poets to, 48 ; defects of ^V hit- 
tier's verse, 107-109 ; reform-poets 
lacking in, 109; Longfellow's, 193; 
recent additions to technical range 
of English verse, 195 ; Lowell's 
merits and eccentricities in verse, 
3M,3i5' — "ipi'ose,328,329; Whit- 
man's lyrical method and rhythm, 
358, — he rejects wonted forms, 372 ; 
how far necessary, 372, yj^ ; Whit- 
man's intricate form, yj-] ; Aldrich's, 
441 ; perfect finish not desirable, 
448 ; of our minor verse, 456 ; over- 
elaboration, 459; youth attracted 
by, 135. 460. 

Tegner, 189. 

Temperament, unrest of the poetic, 
54; the poetic sensitiveness, 268; 
study of Poe's, Chap. W\., passim ; 
Taylor's oriental traits, 406. 

Tennyson, his scientific vision, 69 ; his 
blank-verse, 86, 87 ; Emerson on, 
179; choice of themes, 182; and 
Longfellow, 193; "In Memoriam," 
195; as a dramatic poet, 204, 467; 
influence on Lowell, 310; and see 



512 



INDEX. 



39, 48, 70, 76, 91, 108, 136, 152, 153, 
194, 202, 256, 339, 351, 374, 406, 423, 

436, 459- 
"Tenth Muse." See Bradstreet, Anne. 
Tent 071 the Beach, Whittier's, 114, 

115- 
Thackeray, 223, 286, 328, 452. 

" Thanatopsis," Bryant's, 72, 79, 80, 

81, 85. 
Thaxter, Celia Leighton (1835- )» ^^^ 

landscape, 47 ; and see 446. 
Thayer, Stephen Henry (1839- ), 

443- 

Thayer, William Roscoe ("Paul 
Hermes "), 443. 

Theatre, the. See Drama. 

Theme, primitive absence of, 19 ; in- 
vention of, avoided by great poets, 
20 ; the poet's unbounded liberty of, 
54, 454 ; choice of, by Longfellow 
and Tennyson, 182 ; nobility requi- 
site in, 430. 

Theocritus, 89, 210, 339, 386, 423. 

Theories, Metrical, dangers of, 450. 

Thirty Poems, Bryant's, 74. 

Thomas, Edith Matilda (1854- ), 447. 

Thompson, James Maurice, 443. 

Thompson, John Randolph (1823-73), 

54- 
Thomson, 67. 
Thoreau, Henry David, his landscape, 

47 ; quoted, 68, 69 ; and see 52, 116, 

336, 341, 386. 
Thought, represented by Emerson, 

136, 176. 
Three Memorial Poeiits, Lowell's 

Odes, 344. 
"Threnody," Emerson's, 154, 165. 
Ticknor, Francis Orrery, 49. 
Ticknor, George, 138. 
Ticknor & Co., 404. 
Tilton, Theodore (1835- ), 443. 
Time, its effect on popular ideals, 

225. 



Time, Accent, etc., 373. 

Timrod, Henry, 54, 449. 

" Titan," Jean Paul's, 186. 

Titles, Whitman's effective, 378. 

Tone, a supreme quality, 68 ; Thoreau 
on, 68, 69 ; of Poe's masterpieces, 
258; of Taylor's oriental poems 
407. 

Town-Life, good and bad effects ofj 
468. 

Townsend, George Alfred, 298, 451. 

Townsend, Mary Ashley (" Xariffa ") 
(18- ), 447. 

" To the Dandelion," Lowell's, 319. 

Tradition, and Invention, 179; con- 
flict with, 56, 471 ; and see 469. 

Transcendentalism, its poets, 51, 52; 
Whittier's, 102, 125-128; Emer- 
son's, 140; distinguished from in- 
duction, 146; its strength and weak- 
ness in art, 168, 169 ; Holmes averse 
to, 288, 297 ; Whitman an off-shoot 
of, 355; provincialism of, 356; and 
see 443. 

Transitional periods, 26. 

Translations, etc., Bryant's Iliad and 
Odyssey, 83 ; work suited to the af- 
ternoon of life, 83 ; Bryant's, from 
the Spanish, 91 ; Longfellow's 
minor work, 189, — his Divine Com- 
edy, its theory, merits, and de- 
fects, 209-213 ; other translators of 
Dante, 209, 210 ; the ideal standard, 
210; faulty use of derivatives from 
the Italian, 212; Lowell on, 332; 
Taylor's Faust, in the original me- 
tres, 422-425 ; recent, by Miss Pres- 
ton, Howland, etc., 454; and see 
55, also Dante and Homeric Trans- 
latiojts. 

Travels, Bryant's, 75; Taylor's, 400-' 
402, — his books of, 400-402. 

'* Tribune, The, N. Y.," 256, 400. 

Trochaic Verse, Longfellow's, 195- 



INDEX. 



513 



trochaic clinicicr ot "Hiawatha," 

201, 202. 
Trowbridge, John Townsend, 49, 439. 
Trumbull, John, 35. 
Truth, of Nature, its elusiveness, 151. 
Tuckerman, Henry Theodore, 41. 
T upper, 378. 
Turgenieff, 105, 124. 
Turner, 242. 

♦'Twilight of the Toets, The," 475. 
"Two Rivulets," Whitman's, 362, '^d'^. 
Tyler, Moses Coit, his " Hist, of Am. 

Lit.," 32-34. 
Tyler, Royall, -J3, 466. 
Tyndall, 153. 

"Ulalume," Fee's, 246. 

Ultima Tluile, Longfellow's, 214. 

Under the Willows, Lowell's, y^^ 457- 

Underwood, Francis H., life of Low- 
ell, 307. 

"Undiscovered Country, The," IIow- 
ells's, 295. 

Unitarianism, Emerson's early, 13S. 

Unmoral ity, of French art, 124; Poe's 
lack of moral sense, 269. 

Universality, of expression, a trait of 
genius, 377 ; deficient, in Whitman's 
theory and practice, 384, '>^<C). 

"Universal Soul," the, 149, 153. 

University-Group, the Cambridge, 50, 

51- 

University-Poets, Holmes the Har- 
vard laureate, 276, 277, 2S3. 

Unrest, of the poetic temperament, 

54- 
Utilitarianism, in America, 22-31; 
metropolitan, 53, 54. 

Vagueness, 450. 
Venable, William Henry, 453. 
Verplanck, Gulian Crommelin, 41, 75, 
Versatility, Holmes's, 292 ; Taylor an 
example of, 39S; Fawcett's, 441. 



Vers de Societe, see Society Verse. 

Very, Jones, 52. 

" Vicar of Wakefield, The," 200. 

Victorian Poets, by the author of this 
volume, references to, 2, 26, 27, 75, 
88, 90, 108, 189, 195, 198, 204, 208, 
233. 245> 249. 259, 262, 268, 273, 284, 
307, 321, 327, 339, 342, 374, 383, 417, 
430, 436, 437, 455, 456, 459, 462, 466, 
467. 

Victorian School, 437. 

Views Afoot, Taylor's, 400. 

" Vignettes," ITolmes's, 286. 

Villon, 395. 

Virgil, translations, by Miss Preston, 
Flowland, Wilstach, etc., 454; and 
see 89, 117, 175, 199. 

Vision of Sir Launfal, Lowell's, 319. 

Vita Nuova, 210. 

Voices of the Night, Longfellow's, 72, 
188, 189. 

Voices of Freedom, Whittier's, 457. 

Voss's Iliad, 91, 189, 198. 

Wallace, William Ross, 41. 

Ward, William Hayes, 449. 

" Warden of the Cinque Ports," Long- 
fellow's, compared with Tennyson's 
"Ode," 193. 

Ware, William, 41. 

Warton, Thomas and Joseph, 277. 

Washington, Lowell on, 345. 

Wasson, David Atwood, 52. 

Watteau, 115. 

Watts, 71. 

Webster, Augusta, 447. 

Webster, Daniel, compared with Prv- 
ant, 77 ; and see 299, 323. 

Webster, John, 432. 

Weeks, Robert Kelley (1S40-76), 443. 

Wells, Charles, author of "Joseph 
and his Brethren," 395. 

West, Benjamin, 46. 

"Whipple, Edwin Percy, cited, 31. 



33 



5H 



INDEX. 



W^hite, Richard Grant, his test of our 
national literature, 5 ; on " The 
Scarlet Letter," etc., 6; and see 
400. 

Whiting, Charles Goodrich, 360. 

Whitman, Sarah Helen (1803-78), 50. 

Whitman, Walter (" Walt "), his anti- 
cipatory effort, 21 ; fresh portrayal 
of outdoor nature, 47 ; iconoclasm, 
59 ; recent views, ib. ; traits, 60 ; 
strictures on American poetry, 60, 
389, 390 ; influenced and encour- 
aged by Emerson, 166 ; the latter 's 
qualification of early praise, ib. ; the 
countertype of Poe, 263 ; review of 
his life and works, 349-395 ; birth, 
349 ; Saint au Monde, 349 ; publi- 
city at home and abroad, 350 ; de- 
bate concerning him, 350 - 353 ; 
method of the present inquiry, 351 ; 
his bearing, 352 ; life and song, 353 ; 
a poet of lyric and idyllic genius, ib.; 
Leaves of Grass, reviewed, 354-365 ; 
" Putnam's Monthly " on, 354 ; re- 
lations to the Concord movement, 
355; class feeling and provincial- 
ism, 356 ; first impressions of, 357 ; 
likeness and attitude, 357 ; analysis 
of his theory and purpose, 358 ; Em- 
erson on, 359; habits, haunts, etc., 
359; "The Good Gray Poet," 360; 
disciples in Europe and America, 
360; treatment of, by his country- 
men, 361 ; Centennial Edition, 362 ; 
" Drum-Taps," " Two Rivulets," 
etc., 362, 363 ; prose style, in " Dem- 
ocratic Vistas," etc., 363 ; " Memo- 
randa during the War," 364 ; poems 
on Death, and Lincoln's " Burial 
Hymn," 364 ; choice passages, 365 
his physical and sexual themes, 366 
"Children o^ Adam," 366, 367 
alleged indecency, 367 ; his plea 
in defence, 367 ; the true test of. 



367 ; misconception of Nature's 
law, 368-370 ; mistakes coarseness 
for strength, 369 ; lack of spiritual- 
ity, 370 ; Rossetti's edition of, ib. ; 
examination of his peculiar lyrical 
method, 371-377 ; whence derived, 
371 ; his protest against wonted 
forms, 372; question of technique, 
rhythm, accent, rhyme, etc., 373 f 
views on blank-verse, 374 ; his state- 
ment of his theory, 375, — its true 
origin, ib. ; results attained, 376 ; 
fine diction, titles, epithets, 378 ; as 
a poet of nature, 379 ; of humanity, 
380; his imagination, 380, 381 ; H. 
M. Alden on, 381 ; his " Cata- 
logues," ib. ; pathos and tenderness, 
382 ; science, 382 ; protest against 
conventionalism, 383 ; realism and 
democracy, ib. ; incomplete view of 
the latter, ib. ; narrowness, 384 ; not 
read by the people, 385 ; poet of a 
select and cultured class, 385 ; his 
excessive formalism, 386, 387 ; 
method compared with Words- 
worth's, 387, 388 ; how far affected, 
388, 389; his strictures on Amer- 
ican poetry, 389, 390 ; egoism, 390 ; 
benign and attractive old age, 391 ; 
lecture on Lincoln, ib. ; a rhapso- 
dist, 392 ; summary of his traits and 
abilities, 392-395 ; future place in 
literature, 394 ; how far a figure- 
painter, 466; and see 12, 96, 113, 
129, i53» i59> 220,439, 473. 

Whitney, Adeline Dutton Train 
{1824- ), 50. 

Whittier, John Greenleaf, his land- 
scape, 47 ; the people's poet, 48 ; 
more flexible than Bryant, 71 ; re- 
view of his career and works, 95- 
132 ; judgment of, by Greeley and 
other typical Americans, 95 ; Eng- 
lish verdict on, 96 ; how far 9 



INDEX. 



515 



national poet, 96, 97 ; Parkman's 
" the Poet of New England," 97 ; 
New England's bard, 97-99 ; a test 
of this, 98 ; his constituency, 99, 
TOO ; poet of an historic time, 100 ; 
birth and training, 101-104; an- 
cestry, loi ; Quakerism, loi, 102; 
early farm-life, 102 ; influenced by 
Burns, 102, 103; first acquaintance 
with Garrison, 103 ; entrance on 
journalism, 103 ; Siipcrnaturalism 
of Nctv E)igland, 103, 114; edits 
Bramard, 104; devotes himself to 
the anti-slavery cause, 104-106; 
May and Bryant on, 104 ; Voices of 
Frecdovt, 105; edits "The Free- 
man," etc., 105 ; in the abolition 
struggle, 106 , wins the popular 
heart, 106; technical shortcomings, 
107-109 ; hasty composition, news- 
paper-rhymes, 108 ; a " reform-poet," 
109; compared to Mrs. Browning, 
109, 122; "Randolph of Roanoke," 
etc., 109, 122; later artistic improve- 
ment, 109; prose style, no; Mar- 
garet Smith'' s yo2cnial, no; met- 
rical style, 1 10 ; early volumes — 
Mogg ATegone, — Bridal of Pejuta- 
cook, — Songs of Labor, ill; our 
foremost balladist, 11 2-1 14; Qua- 
ker ballads, 113; ballads of witch- 
craft, etc., 113; "Skipper Ireson's 
Ride," 114; Te}it on the Beach, 1 14 ; 
poet of rural life, 11 5- 120; pastoral 
spirit, 116; on Dinsmore, 116; 
Snow-Bonjtd, 1 17-120; his fancy 
and imagination, 119; virginal 
quality, 121 ; passionate anti-slavery 
lyrics, 121 ; personal and memorial 
poems, 122; " Ichabod," 122; reli- 
gious exaltation, 123-128; militant 
and ministrant, 124; his prayer and 
praise, 125; transcendental spirit, 
125, 126; scorn of bigotry, 127; 



trust in the "inward light," 127, 
128; a notable personage, 128; en- 
dearing traits, purity, philanthropy, 
earnestness, 129, 130 ; poet of the 
altar and the hearth, 130; He- 
braic fervor, 130; Oliver Johnson 
on, 131; prophetic quality, 131 ; in 
the Land of Beulah, 131 ; compared 
with Taylor, 414; and see 12, 92, 
191, 213, 216, 223, 313, 325, 385, 390, 
400,412,439,452, 459. 

Whittredge, Worthington, 46. 

Wigglesworth, Michael, 33. 

Wilcox, Carlos, 47. 

Wilde, Richard Henry, yj. 

Will, Foe's lack of, 234, 269-272. 

Williams, Roger, quoted, loi ; and 
see 34. 

"William Wilson," Poe's, 231. 

Vv'illis, Nathaniel Parker, 41, 42, 75, 
265, 266, 400, 401. 

Willson, Byron Forceythe, 49, 453. 

Wilson, John (" Christopher North "), 

39> 257. 
Wilson, Robert Burns (1850- ), 451. 
Wilstach, John Augustine (1824- ), 

55' 454- 

Winslow, Edward, 34. 

Winter, William, quoted, 236; his po- 
etry and prose, 440. 

Winthrop, John, 34. 

Winthrop, Robert Charles, 283. 

Wit, Holmes's, 277 ; its tenure in art, 
321 ; Lowell's, 332. 

Wood, William, 34. 

Woodberry, George Edward, 461. 

"Woodnotes," 154, 164. 

Woolsey, Sarah Channing ("Susan 
Coolidge") (18- ), 446. 

Woolson, Constance Fenimore, 463. 

Wordsworth, Bryant's master, 66, (yj^ 
72; quoted, 67, 76; Emerson on, 
179; contrasted with Whitman, 387 ; 
and see 39, 65, 70, 75, 134, 141, 149, 



5i6 



INDEX, 



152, 173, 286, 315, 317, 319, 334, 335, 

374, 444, 453, 470. 
Work, Henry Clay (1832-84), 49, 443. 
Wright, William Bull, 52, 443. 
Wright, I. C, 212. 
Wyant, A. H., 46. 

•* Xariffa." See Townsend^ M. A. 



Ximena, Taylor's, 399. 

Year's Life, A, Lowell's, 309. 
Young, William, 454. 
Younger Poets, the, 61 ; and see Chap, 
XII. 

Zest, marked in Holmes, 278, 281, 



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